Schism

    I've been thinking a lot about the multiple personas we display depending upon the people we are with and the situation.  More than knowing the right time and place to tell that bawdy joke, I'm talking about the different people we become to match a locale - sometimes referred to as wearing different hats or masks.  For example, I have my mama persona, followed closely by the wife one (sometimes they intermingle), the manager one, the sister/friend, the performer/writer and maybe a couple others.  At the core is me, or my perception of me, and the rest is layered on from there.
     My kids have never seen me act or sing professionally, mostly as that part of me has been on hold since they were born.  They've seen me at work, but they were so young and I wasn't really being a leader at that moment in time, so they don't know that part of me.  They absolutely know the mama who walks through the door and hasn't quite transitioned from work to home.  My husband has had many a conversation with me about the people I live with not being my employees.  (I am clearly still a work in progress.)
      What has been keeping me thinking is that so many of these personas are necessary, sometimes due to the nature of life (i.e. work vs. home) and sometimes due to necessity (i.e. Heather's true desires vs. what Heather can get away with the world knowing). If my need for organized paperwork spills over into my home life, no harm no foul.  But if I was the sort of person who fell in love with inanimate objects (objectophilia), I should probably keep that between myself and said object (and my support group).

     So, I've been wondering whether this separation of church and state can lead to a fracturing of the subconscious. Is this compartmentalization a way to deal with the necessities of life? Or ultimately does this lead to a less then fulfilled human, a broken soul (more emotional than spiritual)?  Is this the sort of thing that shocks your kids when they clean your personal effects out after you've shuffled off your mortal coil and gone to join the choir invisible?  Do we leave anything in writing, or burn it all before we die?  How much do we want our loved ones to know about our true selves, the part we listen to crappy love songs to satisfy.

     Mom and I had a discussion about her notebooks and personal records long before she died.  She said that if anything happened to her, I wasn't allowed to read any of it.  I was to destroy it all.  I told her, tough luck - I'm not destroying anything.  Needless to say, that pissed her off.  It caused her to start winnowing out her personal effects long before she died, airbrushing her image and my understanding of her.  As her death was so unexpected, she didn't get much headway on clearing the farm out. After she died, I was left with a couple of boxes of papers and notebooks to look through. I won't share the intimate details, because she didn't want me to know them after all.  It did make me wish that she had wanted to talk about some of this with me before she died, because I wanted to understand the whys behind some of her choices in life.  

     Oracle reminds us that we've already made our choices, we're just here to understand why.  Perhaps there's no more reason for my mother to explain herself, as there is for me.  As long as we're all consenting adults here, and comfortable with our conscience, then shifting in and out of whatever applicable persona is necessary for the task at hand might not fracture you or obligate your exposition.  But it begs the question, which is the authentic self and which are the clones.