Dual Personality in Mellix's From the Outside, In

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Ever since the dawn of time, people have been communicating with others around them and with today’s technology people can interconnect with people across the globe. They have access to a wider range of peers and colleagues like no other time period and the possibilities continue to advance these communications. Yet as those in the world continue to make new friends and hear the opinions of more people they slowly develop a dual personality. Though people have always had parallel identities, one for family and friend, and another for acquaints and strangers, as Barbara Mellix points out in her essay. Mellix is a writer and educator who’s essay “From the Outside, In” tells how she grew up learning two identities so she could function in both her personal world with close family and friends, and her world that dealt with others. Now as the world of the others has expanded with the help of technology so has the use of the second identity and it has taken the form of the online identity. People’s second online identity is always on an aggressive defense, paranoid to the point of any wrong thing said or unsaid could lead to a fight, and they tend to only be happy when there is someone to attack. In the physical world where people are surrounded by true friends and people they trust with their emotions and they are more caring and sympathetic of others’ pain. However the online identity poses a threat to the personal identity as people begin to pull traits from one identity to the next. Although not having an online identity Mellix can relate to this with an experience that involved confusing her identities. Mellix describes how when her personalities become mixed, she was puzzled about who she was and who belonged in her personal iden... ... middle of paper ... ...amily like others, much like Mellix did with her sister. Over the years people have all safeguarded their personal identities for the risks of emotional pain that others can cause, the recent use of the online identity being another fortification to this protection. However this has lead people to confuse which identity is their personal one and which is their online one, because of the development of taking technology with you. This can harm one’s relationships with close friends and family that sometimes get confused for the others. With the consequences of bring aspects of online identity into personal identities, many people find it hard to maintain the boundaries of these two. The first step is to understand the problem so one can better see how each identity can fix into its place and still be able to protect them from any positional emotional scarring.

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