Today I want to explore the concept of the persona as a magical tool.
First, the setup, which might sound totally unrelated, but I promise I’ll tie it together. 🤓 Between now and Valentine’s Day 2025 (my intended launch week for my novel), I need to create a business from scratch (website, mailing list, etc.) to provide a home on the interwebs for my romantasy writing.
Over the summer I did a lot of journaling and chatting with my spirit guides about how to approach this stuff in a way that feels every bit as creative (aka, nourishing) as writing the books. While there will be tech-related tasks unlikely to set my heart aquiver with passion, I’ve nonetheless become very interested (inspired by my family estrangements), in giving myself permission to do things the way I actually want to do them.
This might differ from how it’s already been done or what people are telling me I “should” do. I don’t necessarily want to reinvent the wheel with every task, of course, so I’ll be drawing on so-called best practices in marketing, web design, etc., but I’ve noticed a definite shift in my thinking. 🧠
Instead of fearfully outsourcing my agency to experts, because otherwise I might get it “wrong,” I’ve been finding inspiration in what experienced people are doing, while intentionally creating space for what feels exciting to me. After all, what good is a “perfectly” structured marketing calendar if every day is crammed with loathful tasks? (Cue major procrastination… 😵💫)
I’ve also been more considerate of what feels supportive to my mental health.
This is directly related to the family estrangements, which, cumulatively, have been a journey toward a greater willingness to experience other people’s rejection, rage, and disappointment in service of taking care of myself.
If my mental health is in the toilet, I can’t function, so if something is diametrically opposed to my wellbeing, it’s either got to go or my relationship to it must change.
For instance, social media and I don’t get along well, something I denied for years. It’s too easy for me to get sucked into a spiral of comparison, FOMO, time spent scrolling that I can never get back, and other nonsense that leaves me feeling like 💩.
So, I made some changes. For the last year-ish I’ve been using a third-party app to schedule all of my content (and there’s not much of it, which makes it easy). I spend less than 10 minutes a month logging onto Instagram to make sure nothing major needs my attention. It’s glorious.
Could I make more money by spending more time on social media? Maybe? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I do know loads of authors who pour hours each week into social media with very little return unless they pay for ads, which makes sense. These platforms are businesses—they exist to make money for their shareholders.
But regardless, does it matter if I could make more money if it means my mental health plummets? In the past, I would’ve found a way to rationalize this trade, but now it feels like a no-brainer: absolutely not worth it.
For my romantasy business, I have some social media ideas that feel genuinely fun to do, so I’ll likely stick to those and use a third-party app to schedule them to limit my time on those platforms.
This, at last, brings us to the persona as an entity and a magical tool.
Whenever we interact with the world, the persona is there. Similar to outfits, we all have multiple personas depending on the context—work, close friends, social media, etc. It’s easy to dismiss the persona as a phony-baloney construct, one we should do away with if we want to be more “authentic,” but a persona is indispensable. It serves as a mediator between our inner world and the outer, and eradicating it would be akin to living without skin.
The issue is when we, ourselves, mistake any one of our personas for the sum total of who we are. In Jungian terms, we could say that identifying with one’s persona is the opposite of individuation, which is a process of self-discovery and developing into an individual.
To understand this, let’s explore the persona using the metaphor of clothing. The collective psyche, which contains both conscious and unconscious elements, is a giant closet of clothes we all share. The closet belongs to no one and everyone—it’s collective.
When we forge a persona, we borrow items of clothing from the collective closet. There are a million other shirts and pants and socks just like the ones we’ve borrowed. And sure, maybe we cuff our pants a little differently or leave our shirt untucked, but the clothes aren’t unique to us. A bunch of other people are wearing them.
This is the persona.
It can feel uniquely personal because we’ve selected certain pieces of clothing from the collective racks (some have been assigned by our family and peers), and we’ve invested time and energy into identifying with these items of clothing, but they’re still a borrowed costume.
This is similar to how our capitalist culture encourages us to “exercise our creativity” by buying stuff, by being loyal to particular brands because this “says something” about our personality. (Are you an Apple or PC person?)
The thing is, this costume could be at odds—sometimes wildly so—with who we are inside, and if every time we look in the mirror we see this costume and we tell ourselves, “This is who I am,” we might never get to know the person inside.
Nonetheless, the persona is useful. I, for one, don’t want to go to the grocery store buck naked, so pants are awesome. But if I think the sum total of me is the person strutting around in borrowed trousers, I’m sorely mistaken, and I’m setting myself up for a life of disconnection, both inner and outer.
What does this have to do with magic?
Well, if the persona is a borrowed costume…we can do all sorts of cool things with it, and like physical items of clothing, this costume can be imbued with magical intent. Tying this in with my romantasy biz, in talking to my guides, I got the idea to take Aven Winslow, my pen name, and use this alter ego very intentionally.
There are numerous threads woven into this plan. 🧶
By being clear with myself and my audience that Aven Winslow is a persona, I can call attention to the “costume.”
This feels important for two reasons: I’m reminding myself that this is not the sum total of who I am. I’m reminding my audience of this, too, while also calling attention to the fact that all of us, when interacting with others, and especially online, are operating to some degree through a persona.
Rather than pretending that I’m 100% authentically Aven Winslow, I can be much more transparent (and again, remind myself of this fact) about the inevitable whittling down of a whole person that happens in public interactions.
IMO, one of the most challenging aspects of living with a bombardment of social media is the illusion that we’re being wholly authentic on these platforms, which then carries into other areas of life. It’s easy to forget that we’re stepping onto a stage with the desire to present a particular image (i.e., a persona). We do this as much by what we post as by what we leave out, and this is true in in-person interactions, too. My Aven Winslow persona serves as a reminder that this is the version of me who writes romantasy books and who is stepping onto the stage to talk about these books.
On a magical level, I can use protection magic to reinforce Aven Winslow’s aura. If I get any negative reviews (pretty much inevitable when you put creative works into the world), being very intentional with my persona makes it a little easier to separate those reviews from who I am as a person.
I can also do super fun—I guess we could call them “metafictional”?—things with this persona, like inserting Aven into my fictional world, because Aven is already part fiction. What happens if I create a story about Aven Winslow finishing book two in their romantasy series? Does that make it easier for me, IRL, to finish book two? I don’t know, but I’m very curious to experiment with this!
Thinking about how much we share of ourselves and with whom also gives us useful information.
If, in certain relationships, there’s a long list of things I don’t feel comfortable sharing, that’s interesting, isn’t it? Am I just not that close with these people? If so, not sharing much might make sense. If they’re people I’m telling myself I’m very close with, and yet I still don’t want to share, maybe I want to explore this.
💡 Do I not share with anyone, ever, because I’m afraid of being rejected?
💡 Do I not share with these specific people, because they’ve demonstrated a lack of care when I do share?
💡 Is there a common theme to the things I don’t share? To the things that I do?
All of these questions can lead us to a deeper understanding of who we are, what our personas encompass, and how those elements interact.
Plus, in a world where it’s easier than ever to share every nanosecond of our days, it’s important to be intentional with what we choose to keep for our close relationships and just for ourselves.
Personally, I don’t think anyone is meant to live on a stage 24/7. As much as I choose to share in these emails, they are categorically different from my journal entries. If the only form of “journaling” I did was online, there are so many things I wouldn’t feel comfortable sharing, and in time I probably wouldn’t even share those things with myself.
Into the shadow they go. 🌘
The bigger and stronger my shadow, the more pressure my persona exerts to keep everything locked away. I become more rigidly controlling of myself (and likely other people, because their unpredictability threatens to trigger and expose my shadow), I cut off contact with my instinctual energy (unfortunate, as this energy makes me feel alive), and I become increasingly reliant on “experts” telling me what to do.
The persona and shadow become a vice grip, squeezing the life out of me.
By developing a more intentional relationship with the persona, we’re better able to see it as a facet of who we are, not the sum total. This makes it easier to shed light on our shadow.
And then, the persona and shadow, two aspects of the psyche that often make it awfully hard to know ourselves, can become tools for doing precisely that.
Happy Full Moon! 🌝
