Onion Pakoda

Recently I faced a situation where I had to provide a short description of myself to a prospective editor who wanted to publish one of my articles. I was going through a transition in my professional life at that time and was considering many options so I found myself unable to jot down the few lines that were needed. But what really got me thinking was that I could also not describe myself from a personal perspective. Whatever I could think of was either the way my friends and family would describe me or what I would desire to be described as. If I were to write the truth then I'd have to expose parts of myself that no one knows, like my fears and anxieties. Now we all know that in everyday life we perform many roles according to the situation we are in. For intance the personality that we portray at work may not (and most often will definitely not)be the same as that which we show at home with our family members. Even in a transaction with one's own child a father will be a friend when he's playing with the him/her on the beach and a stern higher authority when he chastises the same child when he/she does does something undesirable. While transaction analysis does a good job of describing the 3 'ego states' (Parent, Child & Adult) and their transactions, very often I realize that there innumerable such states that we go through with every passing day. Every day I learn more about myself and the world around me which I incorporate into what I already know. Sometimes there are opinions that we discard for new ones, sometimes we adopt the ones we discarded before. This ever changing perspective of ourselves is all that we have while we go about our social lives. One way that a social being brings some apparent consistency is by believing in a static view of oneself which is referred to as ego, identity, personality, mood-state, conditioned response, learned behavior, classical conditioning in action, and so on. This ego state then becomes our protection from the stimuli of change that we face every moment. This then becomes the point at which we stop growing. This is the dry lifeless skin of the onion that covers the soft and juicy inner layers. But life sometimes presents opportunities like a moment of deep insight or some emotional trauma that forces us to peel off these 'static' dry layers to expose a newer layer. This new layer is vulnerable in the beginning, but as it becomes dry and insensitive, it acquires near immortality and near total impermeability. Hacking through that dry skin again....we know how the story goes.