You Are Many: Let Context Call Forth Each Honest Self

In Dhaka, I am the quiet one who listens too much. In my brother’s house, I become the younger sibling again—deferential, careful with my words. But in the coffee shop where I sometimes write, I’m the man who orders with confidence, who nods at regulars, who belongs to the rhythm of that small space.

I am not one person. I am a collection of selves, each one called forth by different geographies.

This multiplicity used to terrify me. Who was I really if I could be so different in different places? But now I think it’s one of the most honest things about being human—that we contain multitudes, that context shapes us as much as character, that maybe authenticity isn’t about finding your “true self” but about accepting all the selves you actually are.

Happy sees this in me more clearly than I see it in myself. She says I stand differently when we visit her family’s village—my shoulders broader, my voice deeper, as if the rural air calls forth some ancestral confidence. She’s right. In that village, surrounded by rice fields and the particular silence that comes from being far from traffic, I become someone more decisive, more grounded.

But when we return to the city, to our cramped apartment with its urban anxieties, I fold inward again. Not because one version is more real than the other, but because both versions are responses to different kinds of truth.

Arash noticed this too, though he doesn’t have words for it yet. Last month he said, “Baba, why do you talk different when Nanu calls?” He was referring to the shift in my voice when I speak to my mother-in-law—more formal, more careful. Even an eleven-year-old can sense that we perform different versions of ourselves for different audiences.

The travelers who claim that seeing the world “found themselves” might be missing the point. Maybe travel doesn’t reveal your true self—maybe it reveals that there is no single true self to find. Maybe what we discover in foreign places is not who we are, but how many different people we can become.

I think about the expatriates I’ve met—Bangladeshis living in London, Americans teaching English in our local schools. They all talk about becoming different people in their adopted countries. The shy person who becomes bold, the rigid person who learns flexibility, the conservative person who discovers their liberal heart.

Are these transformations false? Are they betrayals of their original selves? Or are they evidence that we’re more flexible, more capable of change, than we allow ourselves to be at home?

Maybe this is why travel can be so addictive. Not because it shows us exotic places, but because it gives us permission to try on different versions of ourselves. Away from the people who know our patterns, our histories, our limitations, we can experiment with being someone new.

But here’s what I’m learning: you don’t have to leave your city to find your other selves. They’re available in every relationship, every role, every situation that calls forth different aspects of who you are. The self that emerges when you’re alone with your thoughts is different from the self that appears when you’re comforting a crying child, which is different from the self that engages in philosophical conversations with friends.

The question isn’t which self is real. They all are. The question is whether you can love all of them—the anxious you and the confident you, the social you and the solitary you, the person you are at home and the person you become when you’re far from home.

What if the most authentic thing about you is your capacity to be multiple people?