True Colors ......

These days I find personas are like telephone numbers and email addresses ….. we all need more than one to try and maintain our busy lives. For those of us who work, we strive to project an identity considered ‘professional’ wherein behavior is more calculated and determined. Absent of emotion, our thoughts and actions are targeted toward a specific goal or goals, and in the interest of being perceived as a team-player, we form peripheral friendships whose hallmarks are water-cooler discussions and the occasional group lunch, where invariably office politics winds up making its way into the flow of conversation. You try your best to refrain from gossip lest it comes back to bite you squarely in the ass, and more seasoned players steer way clear of office-born romance, because truly nothing good can ever come from such a thing …. unless it leads to love and one of you is prepared to eventually leave the establishment, because everyone else will form assumptions based upon your personal relationship.

At home – as parents – we are often forced to suppress our most ‘authentic’ identities in the name of being good role models and hopefully teaching by example. You don’t exactly want your teenage daughter or son to know if you like to ‘get your freak on’ in the bedroom every night if you’re trying to promote abstinence as the only ‘responsible choice’. You might also smoke an occasional cigarette behind your child’s back on a particularly stressful day or even surf adult-oriented content late at night when everyone else is asleep. We expend so much energy in an effort to come off as a paragon of virtue or model of exemplary behavior, leaving no room for doubt it’s cause enough not to rush home most evenings, reluctant to slide into that coat-of-armor once you pass through the threshold of your door when you’d just as soon be yourself someplace else. Consequently our children grow up with the perception that we are often times ‘out-of-touch’ or in my case when my own daughter screamed at me years ago, “You’re so damned perfect I can’t possibly live up to your standards.” Such was not true except within her own perspective.

Then we have our close group of friends, often times the same people we walk through life with hand-in-hand – our one constant – despite how many incarnations are forced upon us due to job changes, divorce, or a series of bad relationships, or perhaps even death. With these people we become more animated and a little less ‘on guard’. They already know most of our successes, as well as our failures, as they were there with us to join in the celebration as well as lending an extra hand to help prop us up when we needed it most. We can be serious or silly and if we’re lucky we can trust them with some of our deepest, dark secrets knowing they will always remain in the vault.

But if we are truly fortunate and blessed, at some point in life we manage to connect with one other individual with whom we can be our authentic self, the truest version of who we are, and thus the person we were born to be. They help us to define ourselves by supporting our dreams and accepting our short-comings absent of reservation. With no such need to develop a separate identity, we are at last free to shine our ‘true colors’ and thus become ‘beautiful like a rainbow’. Whether you define that person as your ‘life partner’ or ‘soul mate’ he or she is the one who will make you feel complete by answering that age old question of “Why am I here?” Together you will define the meaning of love as you embrace all of life’s possibilities while still remaining as one. This love is defined by descriptive words like loyal, constant and protective. At its core it is eternal, unquestionable and undying, because it has been touched by divinity.

As human being we are destined to falter at times, but true love will always endeavor to ‘forgive’.