i dont know who needs to hear this but the inner core of your "personality" is the series of tricks you used to get your parents' attention when you were two, which is to say your first survival mechanism, which was so load-bearing you never were able to abandon it and instead you have only lacquered it with layer upon layer of accretion until you imagine it is something else entirely, but no beneath a thousand coats your most interior shape can still be glimpsed