This morning I was asked to describe my personality – in five words. The words I chose were: independent, diligent, caring, honest and empathetic. I picked these words on the spot, as it were, because someone had asked me to do so, and these were five adjectives that came to mind at that moment.  When the call had ended, I turned these words over in my mind. Why had I picked them? Were they the right words? No, that was the wrong question. There wasn’t a “right” when it came to picking five words to describe my personality. But there was such a thing as better or worse choices, and more or less honest choices. So, why these five words? And was I even the right person to judge whether I lived up to any of these words?

The more I thought about it, the more I struggled to justify my choices, and this lack of clarity bothered me. I considered each word in turn. All have a degree of truth, but they aren’t the whole of it, somehow. What the hell is my personality anyway, even if I were to commit five paragraphs or pages to the topic? And should I distinguish between simple descriptions or traits, like the adjectives I’d listed, and a deeper, more abiding sense of self, character, or even that of ego? Now I felt like I was looking into an abyss. Five spindly trees clung to the precipitous cliffs: independent, diligent, honest, caring, empathetic trees.

If I was brutally honest, I wasn’t always particularly diligent. I might like to think I was, but there were times when diligence gave way to expediency, or even downright laziness. I could take issue with honesty too. I try to be honest, but I wasn’t sure that a certain amount of self-deception and censorship wasn’t at play, even here. For example, I wouldn’t always disclose that I suffered a traumatic and mind-shattering episode of something at the age of 22, if I thought it might jeopardise my chances of employment in the here and now. It wasn’t something I talked about much in general, come to that. Too complicated, maybe. Caring – I could be that, yet I could also be grumpy, bad-tempered, harsh and overly critical.

Actually, now I thought about it, hadn’t my personality as good as gone? It was like I had believed in a personality once, but now, looking back, personality seemed a strange, irrelevant and unwieldy concept. If we are truly changeable, then my personality probably wasn’t the same as it was ten years ago, or even yesterday. “We never step into the same river twice”. Who said it? I can’t remember now, but I suspect it must have been some philosopher of old. The saying captures a sense of constant flux and flow. Like that river, my personality might have moved on, grown, and then become less central or altogether irrelevant. I doubt that’s the same thing as ego dissolution, or what Buddhism might describe as the disappearance of an ‘I’ on the path towards enlightenment. I think that’s something else again.

Coming back to the words I chose, I tried to think of alternative choices. They actually weren’t too bad, I supposed, although one might wonder why I only chose the more positive descriptors and omitted to include any negatives. I was reminded of a headstone I came across in a cemetery recently.

Stumbling across that headstone and seeing the words at first glance, I had a strange feeling of something being wrong. These words were…no, these were not the words for a headstone! I stood still and read the inscription again. “Irascible, volatile, irritating, irritable”, tempered by “endlessly optimistic and kind”. And of Mr. Dunn: “Stubborn, contumacious” – whatever that was – I’d have to look it up, “limitlessly tolerant and patient”. These words were honest. And they were kind. “A perfect partnership”.

I wondered if the Dunn’s would have answered the personality question the same in life as they, or their family, clearly had in death.