if you get lost and loose yourself, what does it really mean?

I am on this new self-discovery kick.
I blame this on Christina because she is on a self-discovery kick, and while this may be pretty normal for think-too-hard-try-to-sound-smart-all-the-time me it's really unusual for sing-and-dance-your-way-through-life Christina. So it's a given that I would catch a more serious version of whatever it is that she has.

Suddenly it sounds really exciting to know who I am and what I'm good at and what I'm bad at and how this all fits into the big picture of my life. If I were a character in a book, how would I be potrayed? How do people perceive me when we first meet- how do my best friends think of me? If there was one word to sum up the essence of who I am, what would it be?

I've been doing that for my friends lately. Of course everyone will have a different take on any one person, but they probably fall in the same general direction. I see Beth as being romantic, my dad as patient, Christina as cheerful and Jacob as loyal, Lindy as artistic, Kacy as optimistic, Dan as knowledgable. Then there are people who are so intricate and complex they are impossible to pin down in one word- like Danny, Anna, and Michaela. There are also those about whom I just don't know enough to say.

And even within the people I think are very straight forward and easy to understand, there are layers and unexpected hills and mines, all steming from the same core identity. Beth may be romantic but I know she can also be remakrably cool-headed and practical, which may seem like the antithisis of romantic but they both fit together without conflict inside her personality. These things confuse me. I'm realizing that the years I've spent pigion-holeing people into personality groups were not helpful in enabling me to understand people. People are very, very complex. I'm not even totally sure it's safe for me to even make these statements about individuals.

Obviously people like knowing who they are though, as thousands of facebook and myspace quizes will testify. I think it's helpful when people tell me things about myself- I always think long and hard about what they say. The problem is we're usually too afraid of offending, or sometimes, we feel the truth would be too harsh to share. I think it's good to know, though. Otherwise we'd just get stuck in a rut and we'd never change at all.

Fictional characters are a very interesting reflection of the way we see people. First and formost they are always consistent with themselves. It's very inspiring. The brave girl is always brave and the timid sister is always timid.

When I'm writing up characters I usually have a very definite idea of what the essense of this character will be, but from that point there are SO many different directions I could take him/her. One girl who is supposed to be tough goes from being an emo with a broken heart to a major sports fanatic to a hip hop dancer to a Christian girl with bad social skills in the space of a few weeks, and I rotate between having her be pale and beautiful and super skinny to bouncy and freckled with currly hair without ever really noticing, to me she stays exactly the same in the way that I know her. It's when I try to nail her down as just one thing that I tend to get frusterated. And this is the same journey that I go on with myself, trying to figure out exactly who I am.

I'll let you know when I've got it completely figured out.