If you act the same way with your coworkers as with your dog, speak the same way with a friend as with your toddler, or perform in the same manner at the park as you do in your bedroom, there may be reason for real concern. Different environments, and different relations, bring out different personas. The multiplicity of our associations reveal the manyness lurking within us. Some of these personas are obvious, surfacing daily—the work self, the home self, the cautious self, the judgmental self, the spouse, mother, or father self, and so on—while others are more clandestine, unknown even to us at times, that is, until the right conditions elicit their surfacing. Mirrors, accordingly, deceive us, reflecting back to us a solitary soma, while just beneath the surface the psyche’s plurality teems and bristles with a kaleidoscope of life. The internal dialogues of the self make it difficult to meaningfully use the word “self” when looking at ourselves or another. “I am large,” Walt Whitman confessed, “I contain multitudes.” The selves we contain, and the selves we are, are potentially beyond counting. I contain selves now I did not just a few years ago. Awareness of our inner diversity and its continual unfolding, new selves being born, others fading away, is a great strength, while denial or ignorance of this inward individuation breeds chaos and confusion and can stifle our ability to live kindly and gently with others and ourselves. If I tend to worry, yet fail to recognize the worrying self as but one of a host of other selves, I may overidentify with worry, thinking I am a worrier, when in fact “I” am so much more. Ipseity might be an illusion but this is far from being a problem. You are beautifully and brilliantly dynamic! The “person” you were yesterday is not who you are today. Nor the one you will be tomorrow. Our becoming is as fluid and as many as the waves of the sea.
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