Friday, August 1, 2008

The guts part of him

You know, I find it amazing how different a person I become when I travel with different people.

When I travel with Justin, I am more obscene and less restrained, spend more money, eat in more restaurants, spend a lot of time looking for weird monuments or going to bizarre parties, doing things it usually wouldn't occur to me to do.

Travelling with Jason, I spent a lot of time having intellectual arguments, scrambling over rocks, and being outdoors.  I love being outdoors.  I love having someone to share that with.

Traveling with Colleen: just like being with myself.  Traveling with my mom: spend a lot of time singing and making lists.  I don't sing around almost anyone else.  traveling with Wolf: walking, endless walking.

I'm okay with all these variations of me.  Each person who goes with me someplace becomes a venue for another piece of myself.  I can express something different with each of them.

But I wonder if there is one person who expresses all these things in me at once?

1 comment:

Ray Lee said...

Our gestures and eyes, smiles and words, they are too skinny a connection to shove our personalities through at any speed. It feels odd, I agree, living a faceted life, where only partial aspects of our personalities come forth among different people.

This is a wonderful reason to take someone you care about and bring them along, shuttling them through your day and interactions, seeing the different soundings the others about you can acquire on the submerged bits of your personality.

That we are contextual creatures, this is a cause for celebration. We are adaptable and sensitive, and have a wellspring of bits of personality that can endlessly be called forth, evaluated and discarded or embraced. To some extent, 'I' is legion.

Our true selves? I think that's the part of us that's constant under changes in circumstance or situation. The rest? The rest is us, too, but to a lesser degree.

So is there one person who expresses all those things in you at once? You are that person, you are the sum of all possible Claires that could exist at any moment, and by personality and choice you shift aspects of yourself to the surface to be seen by all.

Our identities, they are quantum things, superpositions of many possible selves simultaneously.