For us to say that personality is a rock: crevices and concaves, smooth edges, jagged ledges standing tall and proud, blocks of solidarity, it only naturally follows that covering this, then, the pretty prints and floppy flaps of cloth would be the personage; blankets stitched and stitched to perfection, social media pictures and polite niceties, charming smiles, pretty poetry.
Let me tell you a story about these two, and you.
You’re seven and you’ve seen that society favors the intellectual. You’ve seen the collection of awards and accolades won, you’ve seen the luxury of being number one, and you know you want it for yourself. But son, your school days are comprised of not learning, but of wording your answers just so and asking the right questions so your teacher thinks you think of things deeply. That is personage one; the first stitch to your personage blanket.
You’re eleven and you’ve just shifted schools again, so you know you have the breathing room to move from personage one to personage two. Your childhood friends are dusty footprints, fissures in the sands of your past, but no part of you could could squeeze enough tears out to water their memories- you simply cared too less. Only later will you realize your footprints have always been walking on and on and never backtracking or looking back long enough to care, and you’ll know that your human skin has already started changing to porcelain, and that’s when your first cracks will appear. For now, you’ve observed long enough and you know enough to know what personage two will be, so you take your safety blanket from before and you stitch new threads into it. You buy a better pair of boots to leave better footsteps behind you as you walk, and yet you know you’re never looking back to see them.
You’re thirteen and you know you’ve done something horribly wrong. You know you left your footprints right and you know you stitched your blankets just so, but there are those who saw how you never looked back and in the midst of gusts of wind when your blankets flew, the few who saw what you were underneath. The very point of your blanket begins to waver and you’re left almost naked with frayed bits of thread in your pocket and everybody looking at the real you, naked with imperfection and riddled with ugliness seeping through all your pores and you’re yearning for something that would make you, not you, but it never comes.
Then your school changes and your city changes until once again you have your blanket beside you. But, by now you’ve grown enough to know that blankets are not something to be proud of. By now you know that the very fact that you have a blanket means that you aren’t proud of what you are, and society tells you that’s not a good thing. 7 to 17 and nothing changed, your personality was the rock that it was and your personages begins to flicker and fray at its sharp edges. No matter what layer you put over it, the edges of your personality always cut through and showed your ugly bits and discordant sounds. Your sickness came from within you; your sickness was you.
Your sickness was the porcelain painted picture of your paisley face and the cracks you always wondered whether everyone would see.
Your sickness was the inbred belief that everyone was beautiful because it was the only defense mechanism that let you believe YOU were beautiful.
Your sickness was your rock and its sharp edges, and your sickness was the fact that it was so hard to be someone else.
There were hammers on your skin and there were cracks from the hammers; damage beneath the cracks. No, your skin didn’t bruise and turn blue, your blood vessels didn’t flame and turn red because your skin was no longer skin it was the skin of porcelain dolls of china figurines of cracked and cluttered bits of glass that were so easy to break.
Your sickness took away what made you strong and turned you into porcelain- pretty painted pictures and so easily broken.
So in the end if everything was a social construct and so were you, you might as well construct something good for yourself out of the bricks society is throwing at you,and your sickness made you stack cards into fake houses, not bricks, that fell each time society chucked something at them.
But then again, your sickness itself is a social construct, perhaps it’s not a sickness at all but society just considers it so,

And then perhaps you have miles to go before you break this construct down and find yourself

A bare rock and comfortably naked.