Self-awareness will be the greatest weapon in your character development arsenal. If you don’t have it, dive deep and get it. It will make you a better person too. Double win.

So what’s self-awareness? Well, here’s an answer straight from the pages of the Oxford dictionary:

Take a minute and envision you are one of your own characters. What unique bits and pieces about you stick out? Now pick those things apart. Use them to understand why you are the way you are and why you do the things you do. Good, bad, ugly, doesn’t matter. Just let it out.

Vulnerability is hard, even between friends, so rather than pick apart someone like James Bond or Harry Potter, I’ll volunteer as first tribute. 

My name is Moira and I am super dramatic, which is not to be confused with melodramatic. If you don’t know the difference you should definitely look it up. I don’t do feelings gracefully. Excitement, sadness, irritation- doesn’t matter, I feel it in my soul and it’s not always pretty. 

I am also very impulsive and because I know myself as well as I do, I spend much of my time mitigating my inner-id like a parent trying to manage an overactive child in a grocery store. I talk a lot, if you can’t already tell, and I talk fast because I can’t help it.

Here’s the cool thing: it’s not those two things that make me a real person. You can assign arbitrary attributes to anything. It’s the combination of them that make me dynamic. It’s how they play off one another and influence how I act and react every moment of every day. I get myself into trouble sometimes because (guess what?) I’m dramatic and impulsive. I don’t think before I impulsively speak and I say things I don’t always mean dramatically. See? We’ve come full circle. 

If you cannot pick apart and understand your own personality, how it drives you through the narrative of your life, then how the hell do you expect to do it for someone you completely made up? You can’t. There, I answered it for you.

---

Stay up to date on my projects by signing up for my newsletter and receive news and announcements from me.

Want more? Find me over at moiraeking.com!