Cocktail Party Personna: A Personal Revelation

In the wake of my fourth quarter, I have discovered a little something about myself. I was debating for a while if I should blog about this. But I'm finding that the more I talk about it with friends and family, the easier it gets, and the more real if feels. So here it goes.

I finished my fourth quarter last week. And so ends an entire year at the Portfolio Center. I feel okay. Well...okay isn't really a feeling. I feel disappointed. Disappointed in myself. I've realized that for this whole year, I haven't been 100% honest with my work. Don't get me wrong, all the work that I've done is all mine. But I haven't been putting 100% of myself in my work. In short, I've been holding back, keeping a safe distance from my work. This same mentality is true for a lot of things in my life. Friendships, relationships, performance at work, keeping my room clean, things like that. I've realized that I really put up a "cocktail party persona" most of the time that I'm out and about, be it at school, in most classes, or even when I'm at a party. For the past year, I've been designing with this cocktail party persona in mind. And it has shown in most of my work. I think I've gotten lucky with a few cool projects. But on a whole, I know I'm holding back, and I'm hiding behind this cocktail party persona.

I've blogged a few times about how I haven't had a real relationship in seven years, going on eight now. And I think I've finally figured out why. Fear. I am so scared to be who I really am. There's a big part of me that's actually homophobic. A lot of the time, I feel like people are uncomfortable being around the gay guy, so I feel like I have to make it okay for everyone to be around me by making self-depricating jokes, or just being a caricature of myself. It's truly exhausting to do that all the time. In fact, I've done it so much, that I've actually lost sight of who I really am. To be honest, without that persona, it's so hard to be who I really am. I think I come across as generally friendly and up beat, fun to be around and things like that, which are good things to be. But I fool myself into thinking that's how I always need to be. And in thinking this, I have taught myself to hate myself.

So it's with this discovery in mind, that I go into my second year at Portfolio Center. I feel like now it's time to get serious, and truly give my organic self to my work. I can't say that I won't assume that cocktail party persona. I think it'll take some time before that goes away completely. But the only way I know to make that go away, is to be truly honest with myself and with other people. To do things for myself, that mean something to me. For example, I've always wanted to keep a little notebook with inspirational things in them. Like companies that I'd like to work for, or artists that I'd like to know more about. And I've never taken the time to do it. I intend to learn how to make a book like this from scratch, just for me. But for the meantime, I've purchased one from Pearl. It's not bad. It just feels flat and impersonal. One of my mini-projects for the break, is to make this little book personal.

I'm still excited about being here and being this PC world. I just think from now on, I'll be able to give myself over to the work, and to myself.