I sometimes wonder at our capacity to handle such a wide variety of interactions, each with a separate set of parameters, expectations, obligations and rewards (or otherwise). In each we are a different person, or show a different side of ourselves. Inside, we may feel quite complete, but those who watch us across contexts often find that we turn unrecognizable as we move from one to the other. We are able to move across ages—we are children to some, parents to others, lovers with an infinite range of visages and friends with an even greater range of faces, and all the shades of no-name relationships in between. So many people within each person. Do any of us have a true measure of ourselves as people? While we may outwardly marvel at how little we know of others, and how they constantly show us different sides of their selves, we usually explain it away by attributing it to a latent schizophrenia in the other—and only half jokingly! The person most of us know the least, because we ob...
making sense of the everyday