Persona

The other day in my Theories of Personality class, the professor was telling us about our project that will be due at the end of the semester. Shockingly, I am actually kind of excited about it. It's about personas which, for anyone who doesn't know, are the images of ourselves that we use in different situations. The word actually derives from the Latin word for mask. So they are basically masks that we put on for other people. For the project, we have to write a paper about our different personas and how and when we use them. Then we have to come up with some way of depicting them in a presentation. This just sounds like such a cool idea to me. I have always found the whole idea of personas really interesting, partly because I myself make very good use of them. I feel like I am never the same person in any two situations. We also have to discuss our anima (the male expression of femininity) or animus (female expression of masculinity) and our shadow (the part of ourselves that we keep hidden). That last part makes me a little nervous, but I still think it could be pretty cool. Anyway, I was trying to think of a really unique way to present my different selves, and I think I came up with a pretty good one, tattoos. Tattoos are already a way for us to change the way we are seen by the rest of the world. They are a physical representation of our inner selves, so I think it would be really appropriate to use them for this project. I'm thinking I will have someone take pictures of all of my tattoos and then assign each one to represent one of my personas. Or I guess I could just strip in class so everyone could see them for real, but that might be frowned upon.