Your 1000 Personas

There's this Alan Watts quote that says (and I’m paraphrasing) there are a thousand different versions of you floating around in people's minds, and not a single one of them is the real you. A version of you exists in each person's experience, but your “you” itself isn't the only one.

Isn’t that an interesting thing to think about? To some people you're the quiet one who doesn't speak much. To others you're the guy who won't shut up. Some see you as cold and distant, even mean. Other people think you're the most caring person they know. You're not responsible for the version of you that exists in their heads, but that's the world you live in anyway.

That made me think about how, when you go to your high school reunion, everyone who knew you back then is still frozen in time with that version of you. They knew a specific person in a specific moment, and now ten years have gone by and you're not that person anymore, even though you're still the same human. Neither are they. You've both changed in ways that require actual time and real connection to begin to understand.

The truth is, it takes a lot of time to start to know someone's thousand personas. It takes breaking down walls. It takes vulnerability and trust and shared failure and commitment through the hurt. It takes the peaks and the valleys and all the journeys in between to begin to reveal who someone really is, and even then, even with your closest friend, or your spouse, there are still places where we protect ourselves. There are still parts of us we don't let anyone see.

Except God, of course. God knows every single version of you, the good and the bad and the evil parts and the excellent parts, right down to the number of hairs on your head. Every persona, every moment, every choice, every hidden thing. That's a hard thing to grasp, but it's true, and it matters more than I think we realize.

I have a friend, and he'll know I'm talking about him, who can be a hard guy. Defensive, abrasive, emotionally volatile in a way that comes out as anger. That's one version of him. But I've also seen him in moments where he's gentle and vulnerable, open and soft, compassionate and caring at a completely different level. I saw that version of him when my mom was in hospice, and I saw it again when he spoke at the funeral of one of his dearest friends. Those moments revealed a persona that the world doesn't always get to see, and when you witness it, you realize that the hard guy isn't the whole story.

I think about myself in the same way. Where do I fall on that spectrum? I can be abrupt and abrasive, unkind and uncaring, selfish even, which is the opposite of my why, my purpose. Those are the polar extremes, where all my thousand personas live, and I think the best thing we can do is be honest about that, because we're all walking around with all of them inside us.

But here's where it gets dangerous. In a human-connected world, we know one another much more intimately because we interact with the people in our communities everyday. In today’s world, the internet has become our town square. And that's where social media comes in.

The algorithms don't show you the versions of everyone else the way you might get to see in real life. They're designed to show you one. They reinforce whatever persona they can use to keep you engaged and angry and convinced that you know someone completely.

When you see something that fits the version of someone you've decided to believe in, the algorithm continues to feed it to you, because that's what's going to keep you scrolling. It's designed to collapse complexity into simplicity, to distill an entire human being down into a single dimension.

Look at what happened with Charlie Kirk. Some people saw a passionate person, a faith-filled young man trying to do something he believes in. Other people saw a cold, uncaring, abusive person who was the enemy. The algorithm fed each group exactly what confirmed what they already believed. That's not an accident, it’s the work of something darker.

The devil is always trying to separate us, and one of his favorite tools is making us think we're more than what we really are, feeding our pride and our ego so we become insufferable and unaware. On the other hand, he's also working to tear us down and make other people think ill of us, to create disruption and destroy the Godly confidence we're supposed to have, shrinking the wholeness of who we're actually created to be.