You think you have a personality.
You think it is something you have, the way you have a face. A stable feature of being you.
You list it on dating profiles. You explain it to coworkers. You apologize for parts of it. You take pride in other parts.
Watch it for a day.
In the morning you are patient. By the afternoon you are short. By the evening you are warm again, with the people you wanted to be warm with all day.
In one conversation you are confident. In the next you are uncertain. In a third you are something you do not have a word for.
You call this being in a mood.
You say it apologetically, as if the real you got covered over by something temporary.
But notice. You have been in moods your entire life.
The moods are the only thing you have actually observed.
There is no version of you that has been recorded standing still.
The personality is what you call the moods when you string them together with a name.
The name is yours. The moods are weather.
In a place with weather, you do not say the sky is being rainy today, but tomorrow it will return to its true self.
You say it is raining. You say tomorrow may be different.
The sky does not have a true self underneath the weather.
The weather is what the sky is doing.
The personality is what you are doing.
You will resist this.
Because if the personality is weather, then the person you have been protecting your whole life is not there in the way you thought.
The patient one. The funny one. The competent one. The damaged one. The kind of person who.
All of these were forecasts based on a few sunny days strung together into a story called me.
Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly.
When he woke he could not tell whether he was a man who had dreamed of being a butterfly or a butterfly now dreaming of being a man.
He did not solve the puzzle.
He left it sitting in the middle of the page for two thousand years.
The puzzle is not which one is real.
The puzzle is that the question assumes there is a continuous someone whose realness can be confirmed.
You are not the same person you were at seven.
You are not the same person you were last week.
You are not even the same person you were when this sentence began.
The cells have turned over. The mood has shifted. The thoughts you were thinking five minutes ago have left no forwarding address.
What persists is the name.
The name is a coat hook in a hallway that catches whatever weather walks through.
You walk through the day with the name. The name collects experiences and calls them yours.
Tired in the morning. Sharp at noon. Tender at night. The name files all of it under one folder.
The folder feels like a self.
The folder is a folder.
There is no one inside the folder.
There is only what got filed.
This does not mean you should stop using your name.
The name is useful. People need to call you something. You need to call yourself something to keep your appointments.
What changes is that you stop confusing the coat hook with a person.
The hook holds whatever is hung on it. The hook does not have an opinion about the coats.
You have been having opinions about the coats and calling the opinions yourself.
Watch the next mood arrive.
Notice you did not invite it.
Notice you cannot make it leave.
Notice you also did not invite the previous one, the one you preferred.
The mood is doing itself.
It is using your body. It is using your tone. It is using the sentences you say to the person across from you.
You are not the one running it.
You are the one it is running through.
If this sounds bleak, sit with it for a moment.
It is only bleak from inside the assumption that you should be the one running it.
From outside that assumption, it is the most ordinary thing in the world.
The sky is not bleak for being rained on.
The Buddhists called the personality the five aggregates. Form, feeling, perception, mental formations, consciousness.
Five processes, none of them a self. Each one arising and falling, each one mistaken for the substance underneath the processes.
The mistake is the self.
The processes are what is actually here.
You were never a person.
You were a weather pattern that learned to say I.
This is not loss.
The weather is still happening. The patience and the sharpness and the tenderness and the warmth. All of it is still occurring in the same body that has the same name.
What is gone is the small clenched thing in the middle that was trying to make the weather behave.
The weather does not need permission.
It never asked for any.
You stand at the window of yourself and watch the day pass.
Sometimes it rains. Sometimes it does not.
You stop apologizing for the rain.
Sources: Zhuangzi, the butterfly dream, ~4th century BCE. The Buddhist doctrine of the five aggregates (skandhas), traditional.