Who am I?

I began this book with a question about something I do every day. I meet one person as a medical professional and another as a writer. I speak publicly, work across cultures, and participate in a faith community. I am also a father, a friend, and someone waiting at a supermarket checkout. The person is the same, but the manner changes.

Even the roles do not explain everything. With one child I may respond one way and with another differently. With one customer I might be funny and with another serious. The person in front of me matters. A list of roles tells us where I stand in a relationship; it does not tell us exactly how I will inhabit it.

I wanted to examine this variation without treating it as something suspicious. We can be reluctant to acknowledge our different facets because we may be accused of inconsistency. Yet a fixed manner can fail to meet the needs of a changing encounter. Care sometimes requires a different response. The question is whether I can explain the difference honestly and take seriously what the other person experiences.

Personas also protect us. I do not offer everyone the private understanding of myself that I share with a select few. A customer need not know everything a friend knows. Privacy can preserve a relationship’s purpose and a person’s dignity. But protection needs scrutiny when it conceals information another person reasonably needs. A reassuring face can serve care or hide a relevant uncertainty. Its meaning depends on what it invites someone to trust.

The inquiry has also complicated my first thought that the real me is who I am alone. Private experience matters, and other people cannot simply tell me what I feel. Still, the story I tell myself can miss what my conduct is like to encounter. I may remember an intention while someone else remembers its consequence. Understanding myself requires room for both.

I am interested in the person we can become deliberately and in the selves others encourage us to develop. A desired persona can give direction to practice. It can also become an attractive image that outruns our ability. Other people can encourage courage or use the language of courage to demand harm. We need to ask what the invitation requires and how much freedom there is to refuse.

This book brings those questions together through integrity. The term I use is accountable coherence: commitments and conduct that can be examined in relation to our responsibilities, heard through the experiences of those affected, and revised where they cannot be defended. The aim is not to make every facet look identical. It is to understand what each facet offers and what remains ours to answer for.

I have kept the ordinary encounter at the center of the inquiry. Research supplies ways to investigate variation, learning, effort, and self-understanding. Ethical argument asks what we should endorse. Neither gives us a complete label to place on another person after a brief meeting. I hope the book makes us more attentive to the people we meet, including the person we encounter in private, and more precise about what it means to live responsibly through our many faces.