Complex Personalities

A personality is a conscious being's set of mental traits--not metaphysical traits, like the ability to deductively reason, but personal traits, like a tendency to enjoy conflict or a regular desire to be alone.  Though these traits can be manifested quite blatantly in observable behaviors, sometimes behaviors represent the tip of an iceberg that is otherwise concealed within a person's respective consciousness.

Personality traits always either reflect someone's inborn nature or reflect experiences that a person has had.  Nothing about a personality is by necessity immutable.  Every aspect of a person's behaviors and mental could change over the course of time.  Of course, a personality might remain entirely constant throughout someone's lifetime as well.  Both inborn characteristics and those acquired over time can greatly range in complexity, with some personalities in particular being highly complex.  However, changes produced by accumulated experiences can introduce particular complexity into a personality.

The truth is that human personalities not only vary from person to person, but can also be deeply complicated, paradoxical, and serpentine.  The nuances of a personality might extend far deeper than external observation could indicate.  As we look into ourselves, we might discover preferences and mental habits that are in tension with each other.  People can have desires that are in outright conflict; they can have behavioral tendencies that might appear contradictory from a superficial examination, though they are actually compatible.

An example of a personality paradox is someone with aspects of personality that result in the desire to live and also the desire to die at the same time.  There is nothing logically impossible about this, as it is only impossible to have a desire to live or die and simultaneously have no desire to live/die.  Desiring both at once is not impossible at all.  Though this is an extreme example, many smaller, more mundane ones could exist.

From the outside, this complexity might be mistaken for hypocrisy, when it is instead a paradoxical coexistence of distinct personality attributes.  But that should never dissuade someone from embracing the fact that he or she is a complex being.  There is no need for a person to let a concern for the shallow, erroneous, incomplete perceptions of others to deter them from being himself or herself.  Such an endeavor is meaningless, a squandering of energy over something nonobligatory and petty.

God did not make humans to be universally simplistic creatures or personality clones.  Individuality is a very crucial component of humanity, and within that individuality one might find deep nuances--even nuances so layered and pervasive that to fully articulate them is an impossible thing.  Identifying, assessing, and comprehending one's own personality traits can occur throughout a lifetime of self-discovery.  The large nature of this undertaking does not erase how rewarding it can be!  And in understanding the complexity that we ourselves possess, we might come to better understand the complexity of the other people around us.


I am sorry for the relative lack of content recently (I am busier than I was at the beginning of the year, even though I had 19 hours of college classes to deal with).  I hope to work my way back into writing more posts than I have been as of late!