Who am I? — Popular Edition

I began thinking about this book because of something I do every day. I meet one person as a medical professional and another as a writer. To someone listening to me speak, I am a public speaker. To someone working alongside me across cultures, another part of my life comes into view. I am also a father, a friend, a customer and a member of a faith community.

I move between these encounters without becoming a different human being. Yet I do not speak or behave in exactly the same way in all of them.

Even within one role, I change. With one child, I may respond one way; with another, differently. With one customer, I might be funny. With another, serious. The person in front of me matters.

These are the everyday faces I want to explore. I call them personas.

The word can sound as though we are discussing actors or people pretending to be something they are not. Sometimes we will be. But much of this book concerns ordinary life: the voice we use at work, the confidence we try to find when speaking, the things we share with a friend and the things we keep private.

I do not think variation alone makes us dishonest. Someone who approaches a frightened child and a confident colleague in precisely the same manner may be consistent, but may not be particularly considerate. Different encounters can call for different responses.

The difficulty comes when we ask what those responses do. Does my confidence help someone understand, or persuade them to trust an ability I do not possess? Does my privacy protect something personal, or hide something another person needs to know? Am I adapting because I care, or because I want to get my own way?

I also began with the thought that the real me is who I am when I am alone. There is something valuable in that thought. My private experience deserves attention. But I cannot understand myself only from inside my own head. I know what I intended. Other people know what it was like to meet me. Both can help me learn.

This popular edition takes the questions explored in the academic edition into familiar situations. We will consider the selves we learn, the selves we protect, the people we hope to become and the parts others encourage us to play. We will also consider how much freedom people actually have to choose their manner when acceptance, employment or safety may be at stake.

The examples described as imagined are illustrations, rather than accounts of particular people. Where I draw on research, its findings need to be distinguished from my interpretation and from my argument about how we should live.

My hope is that these pages make an ordinary encounter easier to notice and an uncomfortable question easier to ask. We need not show every part of ourselves to everyone. We do need to consider what each face offers, what it conceals and what remains ours to answer for.