I used to dislike how I turn into a different person around different people. It would confuse me, and I’d feel like it makes me less genuine or less authentic. I’d often wonder, which of them is who I really am?

Until recently, I realized: they’re all actually me! All the different versions. And I love them all just as much. It’s more about what the people I come across are capable of. What they bring out of those they interact with. How much space they allow others around. How true to themselves they are. How loud their own minds sound, and what they choose to do about the things they hear inside.

Because I, am so many things.

I’m a calm, quiet person, yet I can be the loudest, most talkative around those I’m comfortable with. I enjoy long, deep conversations about anything and everything in the world, yet I crack the lamest jokes and laugh over movie lines that wouldn’t normally make anyone even smile, when I‘m around someone who tags along. On most days, I sound extremely content with everything; you’d think nothing ever gets to me. Yet, on those same days I can start complaining about life and spread the worst negative vibes, because of a word someone says that triggers it all. I can walk into a room full of people who don’t know each other and be the first to comfortably speak my mind, yet I can have my hands so badly shaking and my lips so excessively trembling while talking to one person, because the way they look at me can paralyze my brain and totally make me forget even my name.

I’m an introvert by the book, yet I crave human connection. I try to remember to be kind, yet I blurt out words that can cut deeper than a knife. I write love letters to people who’ll never read them, yet I cringe when someone attempts to act slightly romantic. I wish I’d travel the world, yet I find it hard to get out of bed on my holidays.

I’ve lost count of the versions of myself that choose to come out around the different people in my life. Yet more interestingly, I’m slowly realizing that for other people, I am “people”, too. I can bring out different versions of them, too. And it will largely depend on my relationship with myself and my very own versions, too.

February 6, 2020