The paradox of personality is that the parts of us that feel most “defined” are the ones that exist because of other people.

This can sound a bit strange at first. Wouldn’t it be the opposite, that the parts which feel most like us are the most innate?

Well, that depends on whether you see your personality as Who You Are.

While the majority of us do identify with our personalities most of the day, the personality isn’t exactly the same as the thing we experience as “me”.

The “me” underneath is a sense of knowing, a feeling. The personality, on the other hand, is an interface for interacting with the social world.

The best way to separate them is this:

Personality is a set of behaviors and traits you identify with or are habituated to.

It is malleable, it can be changed. Either by a conscious choice or by interaction with the world (more on that later).

For example: A major trauma can change your personality (how you behave), but it won’t turn you into someone else.

The “you” that existed before continues to exist the way it did. Only your interactive interface changes.

The “you” underneath, the “real you”, is something that has always been there, and always will be.

Its shape can change from moment to moment. One moment you may feel playful, another stern. One moment you may feel sexual or another numb. But still, there’s a continuous feeling of “You” throughout that does not bend to the expression of a particular trait.

Personality’s constancy, on the other hand, is largely an illusion. A form of attachment. For example:

Let’s say you think yourself to be a person who is very stubborn.

Ask yourself “have I ever behaved in a non-stubborn way?”

If the answer is “yes”, it means you are capable of not being stubborn at any moment, the stubbornness is just a trait you have some attachment to.

(This attachment is not a bad thing, it’s simply what a personality is. The continuity has benefits for ourselves and others which we’ll dive into later.)

If the answer is “no, I’ve never behaved counter to this trait”, the next question to ask yourself is:

“Would it be technically possible for me to do so?”

The answer is always yes, but if it appears to be no, you can counter it by asking “Have I tried?”

If you dig deep enough, you’ll find that you can behave any way you want to, the personality is simply a set of pre-made choices you default to because, admittedly, constant ​decisions are taxing on the system​, and a well developed personality makes this a lot easier.

Your Personality Is Relational

Let’s get back to what I initially started this conversation with:

The parts of your personality that feel the most defined, the most individual, are actually the most relational.

Think about it:

• Which traits feel unique to you?
• What sets you apart from others?
• What are some traits you definitely don’t possess?
• Which unpopular (or popular) opinions do you hold?

Then ponder: how do you know these things about yourself?

There’s only 1 way to know, and it’s through relationship:

Anything we define ourselves by is based on comparison, reaction or positioning relative to others:

I can’t see myself as playful without pointing to others as being more serious.

And I can only have an “intelligent” personality when I’m not in a room full of people more intelligent than me.

What’s liberal in 1 country is conservative in another. What’s hard-working in 1 company is below the bar in another.

In other words, the traits we define ourselves by as individuals completely disappear unless we have other people to create them for us.

You can only be sexually conservative if others are more loose with sex. Otherwise, your modesty disappears.

That’s right! That chaste purity one person feels so proud of isn’t really an aspect of them. It’s entirely dependent on other people’s sluttiness.

This points at a funny illusion: The more positional our identity (“ego”), the stronger our sense of separation from others.

But the only way to experience being separate is to be connected to them—since it’s that connection that provides us with things to perceive ourselves as separate from.

(Side note: There’s a real beauty to grokking this on a deep level. For example: I have often observed in myself what seem to be 2 competing core desires: The desire to stay rooted in my own values & integrity, whatever happens, and the desire to completely lose myself and be one with whatever happens. But in the most beautiful moments I’ve experienced, I understood both are actually the same.)

Personalities Are Made of Judgments

Let’s rewind to an example I just gave:

“You can only be chaste when you are surrounded with slutty people. Without their existence, the trait disappears.”

This is true…but what if other people don’t agree with the traits you observe in them? (For example, they see themselves as not slutty and disagree that you are chaste.)

This is possible. They can have a certain identity (“I am this, not that”), while you assign a different one to them (“oh no bro, you definitely are that”), which you in turn use to define your own personality by (“…and I am not!”)

How is that possible?

Well, remember that personalities are simply attachments. If we have a “chaste” personality, that doesn’t stop us from acting slutty should we want to. It’s just an attachment to seeing ourselves as chaste.

Out of all the human traits in existence, “chaste” is a trait that we claim, and “slutty” is one we reject.

These are more commonly called “owned” and “disowned” traits.

Psychologists often refer to “disowned” traits as traits which are part of us, but acted out subconsciously.

However, I think it goes further than that.

Since, at any moment, we are free to act in a way that doesn’t match our personality, that means we all have access to the full range of human expression.

In that sense:

An owned trait is what we consciously allow ourselves to express.

A disowned trait is what we project onto others (see in them), then define our identity against.

Both remain accessible to us, since we can behave any way we want to. We’re simply attached to the owned traits and using those to reinforce our identity (through what we judge ourselves and others to be).

Any time we act out the disowned trait, we’ll try to not see it, or to reframe it in a way that looks like the owned one.

People often mention projection exclusively in the context of seeing our own dark side in others. But projection happens for positive qualities too.

Many of the things you admire in others are simply qualities you haven’t claimed / owned yet, and thus forbid yourself access from.

Now here’s where it gets a bit bizarre:

If everyone’s personality depends on contrasting against other people’s traits, but all those people’s personalities are created the same way…how do they actually get established?

It’s like a house of mirrors. And every mirror is a gate.

—A gate? What does that even mean?—

I’m glad you asked!

Your Personality Is a Filter

What’s a gate? A movable barrier that can give or deny access through an opening in a wall.

I’m sorry, you already knew that. I guess what you really meant to ask was “How does this apply to personality and projection?”

Well, every time you say “I am this, not that.” you are closing a gate to a trait.

By saying “I am not that”, you decide you will not allow that trait to consciously be expressed through you.

This is why self-image can make it so challenging for us to do certain things:

It’s hard to succeed at something when we have a gate that says “I am not successful”.

If you put together my three claims so far:

• Your personality is relational, not individual
• Your personality is made of judgments projected on others (mirrors)
• Your personality is a set of gates

…then here’s how that functions:

1. You see a trait or quality expressed somewhere in the world, and you judge it (or you internalize another’s judgment of it).
2. You now start positioning yourself against it, by pointing at others who have it and disowning your own potential for it.
3. This closes the gate, both stopping you from consciously expressing it, and separating you from others who might pass on that same energy to you (​because traits and qualities are vibes, just like emotion​​s​)

Think of it this way:

Any “open gate” in your personality leaves you vulnerable to something expressing itself to you:

If you define yourself as kind, while you may disown the ways that you are unkind, you are still keeping a big door open for kindness.

If you see yourself as neither kind nor unkind, you leave the gate open for unkindness to express itself to you. Because you don’t reject it. ​You probably also won’t be absorbing and passing on other people’s rage​. The kindness gate in your personality acts as a filter that protects you, even if some unkindness can still slip through.

In other words: Just as in a medieval castle, the closed gates in your personality protect you from invasion.

However, it also does so at a cost:

The closed gates also keep out most other people who have that gate open (by judging them), and they keep out the same traits in situations when they are useful.

A “gentleness” gate stops you from acting aggressive, which is generally a good thing. But it also stops you from being aggressive in situations when you really need to be.

If you see yourself as “scientific”, you probably won’t ever get indoctrinated into a religious cult. Because you have a science gate that stops any woo-​psychofauna​ from invading your brain.

However, you might still get indoctrinated into a ​rationalist​ cult. Because those can pass through your gate. And you’ll close yourself from having mystical experiences of any kind, unless science itself facilitates it.

A gate is a gate. It filters out specific things.

I’ve found that one of the most useful ways to visualize how personality functions is this:

This is an equalizer.

It’s used in music to amp up (or quiet down) frequencies, changing the character of a sound. And that’s exactly what a personality does:

• Each trait / opinion has a slider
• Max & min volume are set by what we’ve seen in others
• If a slider is down, we “gate it out” of our range of expression
• If a slider is up, we are “gating out” its opposite

Now, remember how at the start of this conversation, we talked about the difference between your personality and who you are?

Just like an equalizer doesn’t actually change the original sound of a track (it only decides which frequencies pass through), your personality doesn’t change who you are—it only decides what you allow to pass through you.

The key to remember here is that you can change the settings of the filter whenever you want.

You can dynamically open & close yourself to traits & ideas to make your personality function better within a given context, the same way a sound engineer can amplify or silence certain frequencies to make sound serve a certain context better.

Ever noticed how sometimes you seem to contain multitudes:

• Shy but outgoing?
• A laid back control freak?
• Friendly but don’t you dare mess with me?

This is because we all contain the potential for every possible trait humans can express.

If your filter on those traits is set right around the middle, this allows yourself to embody both of them while still feeling like “you”. The gate is open.

But of course, opening and closing gates is just a decision. A habit.

Character can be invoked.

Just think of actors in movies:

A good actor doesn’t seem to be faking or pretending. It has to look natural. And if they can do that, it means whatever they’re expressing would also be available to them in daily life.

The only difference is that, instead of their own personality, they are invoking the personality of the character; a different interface for the world to interact with.

While “in character”, the actor embodies that ​role​. They may even think and feel like it.

If this is a thing humans can do, what’s stopping you from asking “which character does this moment need?” and then invoking that personality for the entirety of that “scene”, before coming back to the personality you had before?

Nothing really, except our own attachment to our personality for continuation’s sake.

If we keep a gate stuck in a certain position (open/closed) and believe our personality is us, we block our capacity for invoking the trait it’s keeping out.

We hypnotize ourselves into believing we are “this way, but not that way” by reciting stories, recalling memories and reaffirming the boundaries of our identity.

And we point to our own repetitive actions as proof that the attitudes behind them are inherent to us.

Just as we often look for external authority to tell us what to do, we create rules and patterns in our personalities that limit the options for how we allow ourselves to behave.

Because the more we limit our options, the more relief we find from the anxiety of having to choose our response in every moment.

When we have a personality trait that chooses for us, we don’t need to feel the dizziness of freedom, nor the burden of responsibility.

Because it feels like our actions spring forth from a predetermined place, a personal nature which we can’t transcend.

“Of course I did it that way, it’s just who I am.”

This is a very cost-efficient way of moving through life.

But unfortunately, it can’t be achieved without creating a certain sense of stuckness or helplessness either.

That’s the flip side of the coin. We must hold an unshakeable belief that “this is just the way I am”, because if we would see past that illusion, we’d become aware of the infinite other choices we can make.

And every choice we make depends on our capacity to feel. Because every decision involves cutting off a potential future, which often involves pre-decision anxiety and potentially, post-decision grief.

Our personality prevents us from having to feel these to a certain degree, because if something is the default for our personality, there wasn’t a decision to be made. We simply behaved according to what we perceived to be our nature.

In other words: the degree to which we are attached or addicted to our personality depends on our ​capacity to feel​.

The more we have capacity to feel intense feelings, the more we are free to move the filters of our personalities.

And the more filters you allow yourself to interact with, the less limited your options become.

Not just in an abstract sense, but in a real, therapeutic sense.

For example:

“I’m an anxiously attached person” is a very different belief from “I’m behaving in an anxiously attached way”.

The answer to the latter is “pivot your behavior”. The answer to the former is “try to escape this pattern that literally rules my behavior”

If you’re stuck, remember you can open the gate.

Personality As a Social Interface

There is a second reason we tend to stick to our same configuration of open and closed gates, and that goes back to the very topic we started this conversation with:

Personality as a social interface.

When people behave erratically and all over the place, it’s much harder to predict their behavior.

That is why, societally, we tend to label such people as crazy and shun them unless we have determined their particular brand of crazy isn’t dangerous.

In order to trust each other, we need ​some kind of map​ of who each person is. That map is, of course, rarely accurate. It doesn’t represent Who Each Person Really Is.

But having some set of semi-reliable personality traits allows people to interact with you in a way that doesn’t purely rely on leaps of faith. In other words:

Even if internally, you are completely free and have opened all your gates, it’s still a good thing to have a personality as a social interface.

Your personality becomes just ​another mask you wear ​. But this doesn’t mean it’s fake or inauthentic, because after all, your personality was built out of judgments. Out of likes and dislikes.

You can continue walking around with the same personality that brings you joy, similar to wearing your favorite outfit, but you can know deep in your bones that you are free to behave differently if a situation ever calls for it (or if it would delight you to do so at a certain moment).