Persona
Grant Montgomery: What is your persona?
We carefully create a persona, but it’s always one that’s only partially true.
And maintaining this partial truth, this created personality, this assembled self, can be pretty exhausting.
Facebook is the perfect median for this bit of artisanship.
It allows us to present an image of ourselves from just the parts of our lives and personalities we wish to project.
… This is why we almost never see updates on Facebook that say: “Spent the evening alone again last night.”
Or: “Wonder if I’ll ever be loved.”
– Accidental Saints, by Nadia Bolz-Weber
There is a side to each of us that is not connected with our feelings, our persona, a side of us simply more concerned about how things appear to others.
Whenever we can’t or won’t share our true selves with others, we experience isolation and pain. We try to alleviate the pain by creating comfort zones. But no matter how comfortable our zones may be, they never fill the holes in our soul. Only when we reconnect with God can we experience wholeness and discover the peace that surpasses all understanding.
Part of shedding our persona, and what will make us real as a person, is placing a higher priority on what is inside us.
Unfortunately though, most of us reach adulthood still more concerned how we appear to others than who we really are.
It is possible to change this perspective. We mature spiritually when we see our problems as opportunities to grow, real experiences in which we accept that we’re not perfect, that we have weaknesses, and that life is difficult; these become opportunities to connect to God.
Now when I speak of God, you may understand God different than I do, but what is important is that we know that there is a power greater than ourselves, and even in the darkest of hours we are never alone.
When we allow God and his love into our lives, we can allow ourselves to be ourselves.