Why not be yourself?

It was not what I was that I disliked, I mean the singular, essential me - altough I grant that even the notion of an essential, singular self is problematic - but the congeries of affects, inclinations, received ideas, class tics, that my birth and upbringing had bestowed on me in place of a personality. In place of, yes. I never had a personality, not in the way that others have, or think they have. I was always a distinct no-one, whose fiercest wish was to be an indistinct someone.


John Banville in The Sea

Pierre Bonnard, auto-retrato