Day 11: Who dat?

Do we ever really know who we are, or for that matter, who anyone is? We spend our lives trying to get along, subtly altering our behavior according to those with whom we are currently spending time. The group of more social friends requires a more outgoing mood, the educated group has us putting on our world events cap, the artsy contingent prompts a discussion of a new book or painting, and the cherished old friend evokes a casual comfort. Just as each of your four children may have differing personalities, so too, does your outward demeanor, except that there is no end to the number of virtual “you’s” that can be created. We may think or claim to be the same person with everyone, but at the very least, work conditions require a professionalism likely unrelated to the swearing or drinking most of us indulge in during the social hours of our lives. After a lifetime of routinely tweaking our social persona, how can we even be certain which self is our true one?

For years I was the bitch. It was not something I intended to put out into the world, however, a combination of insecurity and arrogance created the perfect storm, eliciting a slightly less than Mary Poppins public face. While my close friends understood that I was capable of bitchiness but not actually the bitch, after a few years of that being the expectation I found myself playing into it more and more. Eventually I could no longer discern if the bitchiness created the lore or the assumption inspired the bitch. Worse yet, I stopped knowing how to behave in any other way when around certain people. To this day I still struggle with bouts of this, spontaneously prompting acquaintances to call me “Sunshine” in an ironic nod to my darkened demeanor.

While it was not my intention to come off this way, it’s become a personality I can slip on as comfortably worn and broken in as my favorite t-shirt. The same can be said for that part of me that occasionally waxes elitist, discussing the pedestrian nature of certain restaurants or the clumsy syntax of the regional newspaper. Just as I can watch football for eight hours straight, drinking beer and yelling at the TV, so too can I sip martinis in stilettos and designer fashion. These are all partially me, fractions of my whole self that can be taken out and paraded about for the occasion at hand. It’s not to say that we are all false, willingly projecting a certain persona that is not a true aspect of us, it’s more that we have crafted and cultivated a diverse range of personality traits which can be called forth to meet the criteria of a specific setting.

If we are all continually morphing in and out of varying personas, then perhaps that is why a person you met and very much liked in one social setting becomes a bore or politically offensive when meeting again in a different environment. When you think about it, it seems almost impossible that we could ever meet and like the same person in completely different settings. The odds are against us. There are days when I’m not even sure I like myself, add to that the challenge of getting to know someone new who on any given day may be sporting a personality quite different from that of the person you first met. Are we afraid to be ourselves or do we not know who that is? It has been decades since I was able to behave in a way not dictated by societal constraints, peer expectations, or personal constraints. It’s not as if this is done purposefully. I know plenty of people who will swear that they just are who they are, but look closely and you’ll see that it is not true. A typical 35 year-old woman is a wife, mother, daughter, friend, and woman. This does mean that she is lying or assuming false identities, but the Mother her children know is hardly the same woman her husband makes love to. This is a natural part of living in the world. Just as you can’t be all things to all people, you also cannot be one thing to all people. So what happens when your path is less defined? When your career or personal life do not actively work to flesh out who you are going to present to the world?

Can we ever really know anyone? We try not to think about our parents as sexual people but the very fact of your parentage is proof that they are, or at least were, engaged in a sexual relationship. When my Mother died I found bits and pieces of information that I patched together, creating the portrait of a woman not altogether unfamiliar, but certainly different than I ever gave her credit for. Why did I not know this woman and how did my gentle Mother become a woman capable of thoughts and emotions I never would have attributed to her?

My husband is having to relearn who I am as a person after living through some fairly dramatic circumstances. Our geographical, professional, and intrapersonal environments have changed and now that he is halfway around the world fighting a war he is seeing me less as a partner and more as a woman. Why am I all dressed up and getting ready to leave the house this evening? Where could I be going? Who are these new friends I tell him about? During the years when our lives were intimately tied together there weren’t any big surprises. Our plans were more often than not a group a project, but not my very existence on a day-to-day basis is foreign to him. This made me think, if he met me today, would he still love me? How have the last five years changed me and am I any more real to him now than I was back then. The easy answer is that of course you are the same, your spouse knows you better than anyone, but does he or she know it all? Does he know, for example, that you drink when he’s not around, or that you wish you hadn’t had that last child, or that sometimes you just want him to seduce you rather than ask if you want “to fool around.”

Our circumstances are probably more dramatic than most and my frequent moves and outspoken nature means that friendships are often put to the test, but in the end the conclusions are the same: which you is you? No matter how responsible you are now, there exists in all of us at least a little of the rebellious 15 year-old and the mid-twenties risk taker. Back then we all had so much time so we played the game and assumed that the rest would work itself out, but even now, years later, several children later, a marriage later, a career later aren’t you still trying to develop who you are? The girl I knew at 25 might be only a hint of the woman you married at 30. Is she a different person or has she adapted to coexist with the circumstances and environment she now faces?

I look at so many of the people I used to know from school that are now my Facebook friends and I see not the parents, spouses and employees they have become, but the teenager they once were. Sure they have changed and grown with the times, but they aren’t comprehensively different people at their core, they’ve just chosen to emphasize and explore aspects of their personality that were not as dominant years ago. As we all go about our daily lives it is easy to lose track of the varying people we’ve become. Maybe I am just more aware of the diversity and once acknowledged it is nearly impossible to function without questioning not just your choices, but the very essence of who you are. What if, instead of becoming a corporate executive you were a stay at home Mom, or wrote that bestseller, or travelled the globe with Amnesty International and stayed single. Would you still be you or someone else and more importantly, would you even know the difference?