I’ve written about the different facets to my personality before. Everyone’s got different personas (personae?) that come out the in various situations life throws at us. For example, my work personality is different from the one I bring to my distance running. And those are different from what I show my friends. All of that is different from my private self. If I may bring up that Shrek analogy once again, I’m like an onion: I have many layers. Now, I can say that all of these facets are all still “me” because no matter what there’s enough of a “Jason” undercurrent tying it all together. The trick then is figuring out where I overlap becomes useful.

You may be asking: What is Jason rambling on about?

All of this just came to mind this evening when I was thinking about my sore shoulder. In my last post I was writing about how I was dealing with this pain. Kyleen mentioned in a comment that I should be taking garlic for the mosquitoes (which I am doing) and an anti-inflammatory like Aspirin or Ibuprofen for the pain. After some thought, I took an Advil, and that helped a little bit. After meditating on the phrase “anti-inflammatory” it suddenly came to me that I should be icing the damn area. I mean, what’s exactly what I’ve been telling my running class all this time. That’s what I’ve heard running clinic after running clinic. Last Sunday I was running with a massage therapist and he spoke about how athletes he knew frequently used ice to bring the swelling down. Why the heck hasn’t it occurred to me to do the same for my own aches?

Like I said, in the end I have to learn to merge the best qualities from each of my personas. I also have to be able to move knowledge that I learned in one arena to another. I can’t afford to just keep everything separated. Finding cross-applications will only make me stronger.