Some of us walk around with a necklace of hope, an armour of sanity, but at the end of the day, they always come off. We reveal our naked, vulnerable, real selves.

It is difficult to see ourselves as we are. Sometimes we are fortunate enough to have good friends, lovers or others who will do us the good service of telling us the truth about ourselves. When we don't, we can so easily delude ourselves, lose a sense of truth about ourselves, and our conscience loses power and purpose. Mostly, we tell ourselves what we would like to hear. We lose our way.

We guarantee rude emptiness for ourselves; later in life, when we treat children as - "empty buckets", today.

Maybe a person is just made up of a lot of people," I say. "Maybe we're accumulating these new selves all the time.

It is in community where we find our very selves.