The Real You

It's always happened that whenever I met somebody for the first time, or in a "professional" context such as in a business meeting, I'd always think to myself, "this is not what this person is actually like in real life. This is just a facade. A cover. Everybody's laughing and joking and we're all just best pals, aren't we! It's all so fake!" You ever had that feeling?

But I guess the more I think about it, the more I realize that this point of view is just not true. In most cases, people aren't consciously putting up a facade. They aren't trying to act the way they act. They just wind up acting like that, that's all. It's their natural reaction to that particular situation.

Another way of thinking about this is that there's no such thing as the real you, which is a phrase that gets tossed around a lot. I don't think we're like a stage, hidden behind curtains that you have to pull apart with the help of time and trust to the actual person inside. Nopes, I think we're more like multi-faceted crystal, and depending on the social context, we show a particular side. If we're new to the person we're meeting, the crystal shows "the new person" side - we're all proper and formal. However, with time and familiarity, the crystal rotates. The person's personality changes. A new side is exposed. A new epoch begins.

In this case, I guess, the real you would just be the most coveted facet - the one most fun to hang out with, the one most romantic, and so on. This way of looking at things also explains quite well how dynamic our personalities are. Everybody's heard the story of how the relationship between married couples changes with time. But that's just it - I don't think it's changing. I don't think that a person was "good" before and then turned "bad" a few years later. I think all that happens is that marriage explores all the facets, each one different, with its own textures. People don't "change"....they just expose personality traits that happened to be latent before.

In fact, even with people very close to you, I bet you've only touched the tip of their personality's iceberg. There's a whole continent underneath that's just not tangible to you. The world is in a grain of sand, and every person is a universe in himself or herself. This comparison of the universe and a person is so analogous to how a number growing from 1 to infinity can be as massive with respect to the number of decades as a number shrinking from 1 to 0, even though the physical "sizes" of the numbers are so different. Such duality in the universe just blows my mind.

Of course, I could be wrong, or it could be more complex that this - but on five hours of sleep, it all just makes so much of sense!