Temporary Selves, Permanent Decisions

Yesterday's post on our "true selves" didn't go quite as planned.  I wanted to talk about the decisions that people make in their different mindsets, but it ended up simply being about the mindsets by themselves.  That's ok, though.  It has set the foundation for the post that I wanted to do.  And now I'm going to do it.

People don't have a "true self".  They are constantly changing from mindset to mindset throughout a given day, each one of these selves being equally true.  Our true selves are temporary selves.  However, the decisions we make are permanent.  Even if your current mindset only lasts for 10 minutes, you may make a decision that forever affects your future.

This is not a new concept.  We often talk about a particular breed of these: the "moment of weakness."  When you are just so hungry that you ignore your better judgment and eat that fattening candy bar.  When you are so tired that you say screw it and don't show up to work.  When you are so pissed off that you beat the crap out of some drunk guy and send him to the hospital.  These are all times when our current mindset is not our default, not the one we usually identify with.  In that case, we often feel like we are not responsible for our decisions. "I wasn't myself."

Of course, this doesn't just apply to negative things.  If you're in an exceptionally ecstatic mood, you may be far more willing to be giving and helpful to others.  When we are self-aware of this mindset, we tend to say things like, "If I wasn't in such a good mood right now, I would never do this."

It's a scary thought to me how much a thought you may only hold for a few minutes may cause you to say something that would have a major impact on you.  Imagine that you were in a grouchy mood because your pen ran out of ink and every other pen you try is dried up (admittedly stupid to angry about, but these things do happen).  Now imagine that a person you have a crush on decides at that very moment to come to you and start chatting.  You might lash out at his person through no fault of their own; you simply are in no mood for idle chatter.  The person might consider you the biggest jerk and not want anything to do with you.

That situation kind of sounds like the beginning of a sitcom episode.  The rest of the story would be you trying to convince your crush that you are actually a nice person and they caught you at a bad time.  However, if the person who saw you in your anger was your boss or somebody evaluating you, this could be a much bigger problem (though still sitcom-worthy).

Since this kind of thing happens in sitcoms, there is proof that it already is a part of storytelling (which means it probably dates back to ancient Greece).  However, when it happens to sitcom characters, we tend to ask ourselves how they could be so dumb and short-sighted. Of course, we conveniently forget how often we do short-sighted stuff like that ourselves.

If your characters are the kind that do go through different mindsets, then they can experience this kind of thing.  Whether positive or negative, decisions they make at one point may have repercussions long down the road, even beyond the point where they are in the mindset that they made the decision in.  If you want to do this, do it with pride.  You have realistic characters going through realistic experiences.  You may get some flak from readers because they hold characters to a different standard, but don't worry about them.  Readers don't know what they want.  That's why you're the writer.  So go and write what's right.