Yeah, this idea of our forum personas is a pretty cool space to look around in. Most of my interactions on this forum have been out in the open, but recently I've started to feel inclined to ask myself if something may be better handled privately, and proceed to send pm's accordingly. One thing is for sure, there's no real reason to puff up your chest when it's not a public exchange, and after reading your post, wuf, and looking back on some of these private exchanges, in them I feel like I've been talking to the persons, when I have been mostly interacting with the personas for all these years.

That's kind of just a stream of consciousness, but maybe something actionable to take from it is: it's fairly easy to shift your forum persona-- you can even change your avatar to help distance the new you from the old you, and in the extreme you could make a new account. It is, no doubt, much hard to do this in real life, yet the relative ease with which we can do it here (should we see fit to do so) can work as a sort of rough model for accomplishing a similar transformation in the real world. I don't mean in a disingenuous way, like some sort of con artist, but I mean real self improvement.