The Thousand Versions of You That You Will Never Read

There's a photograph of me at my cousin's wedding from maybe twelve years ago that I keep meaning to look at more carefully, though I haven't. My aunt mentioned it at Christmas, said there was a shot of me laughing at the bar with some of her friends from work, women I'd met maybe twice, and she'd always loved it because I looked "so completely comfortable, so totally at ease with everyone." Which is a fine thing to hear, except that I have no memory of being comfortable that night. My memory of that wedding, which I've carried for over a decade with reasonable confidence, is of standing near a pillar for longer than seemed strictly normal, nursing a drink, watching other people know each other in that particular fluid way that looks so effortless from the outside that you start to suspect it's a skill they teach in schools you didn't go to.

So either the photograph is wrong, or my memory is wrong, or both of them are true, which is the option nobody mentions. But maybe it's the truth?

And the thing I keep getting pressing on (not in a productive way, more in the way you keep pressing a bruise to confirm it's still there) is that the person in that photograph, the one laughing at ease with strangers, was me. Is me. A real version, captured accurately, existing in at least seven people's memories since that night and possibly doing actual work in their understanding of who I am. There is a woman somewhere who remembers the guy who put her at ease at a family wedding, and that guy is me, and I have almost no access to him.¹

You are not one person. You never were. You are, at minimum, as many people as there are minds that have formed an impression of you, and those versions multiply without your knowledge or consent, and they persist long after you've forgotten whatever moment generated them, and some of them are kinder than you'd expect and some of them are darker, and some of them are doing consequential things in the world right now, shaping how someone thinks about trust, or kindness, or who they want to be when they grow up, and you are not present for any of it.

This is, I realize, not a comfortable thought. It is also, I think, not a bad one.

William James, writing in The Principles of Psychology in 1890, said that a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their head.² James was not a loose thinker. He was also not, as far as I can tell, trying to comfort anyone with this observation. He was just describing the structure of the thing. Not "a man presents himself differently in different contexts," which sounds like a self-help caveat. Not "identity is fluid," which sounds like a bumper sticker. A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him. Plural. Distributed. Largely outside his control or awareness.

And yet somehow we spend most of our lives operating as if there is one self, unified and coherent, radiating out into the world and being received more or less as transmitted, the way a radio signal goes out and comes in and you assume the song on the other end sounds the same as the song in the studio.³ It doesn't. And you mostly don't find out.

I started thinking about this in a specific and slightly undignified way a few months ago, when I was in a work meeting and a colleague I'd known for maybe three years said, in a context that was otherwise entirely unremarkable, that she always appreciated how calm I seemed under pressure. Just as an aside. She was talking about something else. She moved on immediately. And I sat there for the next twenty minutes not really tracking the meeting because I was trying to figure out which version of me she had been watching, because the version I have direct access to (the internal one, the one running the narrator track, the one who is aware at all times that the narrator is running a narrator track) is not calm under pressure. He is, at best, capable of performing calm while something quieter and more catastrophizing runs underneath. Which maybe is what calm looks like from the outside. Or maybe she was projecting. Or maybe I have been performing calm for so long that the performance has become, in some functional sense, real, which is either a win or a depressing commentary on what "real" means (I genuinely can't tell which).

Or maybe she knows something about me that I don't.

That last one is the one that hovers. Not in a flattering way. I'm not suggesting she has some special insight into my hidden goodness. She might just have a different set of data. One that paints a more flattering picture than the internal record, because the internal record has access to all the anxiety I'm generating, and she only has access to the outputs.⁴ Which are apparently calmer than I expected.

Erving Goffman, the sociologist who spent most of the mid-twentieth century thinking very carefully about the theatrical structure of everyday life, had a framework for this.⁵ Front stage, backstage. The front stage is where performance happens, where you're managing impressions, presenting the curated version, operating with awareness that you're being watched. The backstage is where the costume comes off, where you eat standing over the sink, where you mutter the things you only mutter when you're confident nobody's logging it. What Goffman noticed, and is the part most people skim past, is that the self is not located in the backstage. The self is not the authentic thing underneath the performance. The self is the ongoing management of the gap between front and back, which means there isn't a real-er you in there somewhere waiting to be revealed when everybody finally leaves the party. There is only the accumulated pattern of all your performances across all your contexts, and none of those contexts comes with a mirror.

The part Goffman doesn't fully work out (or maybe he does, in a later book I haven't read, which is something I say a lot when someone's theory is inconveniently incomplete for my purposes) is the asymmetry. You get access to the backstage. Everyone else only gets the front. But everyone else gets front stages you've long forgotten, or never consciously occupied at all. The offhand comment you made in a hallway four years ago that someone else filed under Defining Characteristics. The way your voice changes when you're nervous in a way you've never actually heard, because you're too busy being nervous to hear it. The expression on your face when you think no one is looking, which is by definition the expression you've never seen, because when you're looking in a mirror you know you're looking in a mirror, and your face adjusts accordingly.

You are generating data about yourself constantly, continuously, at a rate that dramatically exceeds your capacity to receive any of it.⁶ The readout is happening. You're just not in the room where it's being read.

Charles Cooley, writing in the same era, introduced what he called the looking-glass self: the idea that we develop our self-concept not through introspection but through imagining how others perceive us, and then responding to that imagined perception.⁷ Other people function as mirrors. We observe their reactions and infer what we must be. Which is almost poetic, except for the part where the inference is systematically wrong in specific and predictable ways. The mirrors show you primarily favorable reflections, because people filter their reactions in real time, suppressing the unflattering ones out of politeness or conflict-avoidance or plain old human awkwardness. So you are constructing your sense of self in a hall of reflections that has been, quietly and without malice, edited. The distortion isn't random. It tilts in a particular direction. Generosity you've shown gets reflected back amplified; impatience you've shown mostly doesn't make it to the mirror at all, unless the person it was directed at is currently also in the room, in which case, well.

What makes this stranger is the temporal problem. The version of you someone carries from five or eight years ago is not wrong. It's frozen. You've changed since that encounter, made revisions, figured some things out, probably introduced a few new problems you haven't diagnosed yet. The impression has not changed at all. There are people walking around right now whose model of you is circa 2016, or 2010, or whatever year the formative encounter happened, and they'd be surprised to hear you're different, not because they'd doubt it, but because they have no mechanism to update the file.⁸ You've had maybe one conversation with them since, and in that conversation you almost always operated in the register they expected, because that's what social interaction tends to do. It reinforces existing models rather than updating them, because updating them would require one of you to explicitly say "I think my understanding of who you are might be out of date, shall we do a full reassessment," which nobody says, ever, in any context where it would be socially legible.

So there are people out there carrying a version of you that has been gathering dust since the Obama administration, and you're none the wiser, and neither are they, and this is just a completely normal and unremarkable feature of how human social life works.⁹

And some of those frozen versions are doing something. Quietly, in the background. Being the reason someone still thinks a certain kind of person is possible. Being the anecdote that gets told at dinners you're not at, in a characterization you'd probably not recognize but would probably be okay with if you could hear it. You can't.

Thomas Nagel, the philosopher, wrote a famous paper in 1974 called "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?", and I mention this not because I am the kind of person who casually references analytic philosophy of mind in conversation (I am slightly that kind of person, which I'm aware is not a plus) but because the thing he's pointing at is directly relevant here.¹⁰ Nagel's argument is that consciousness has an irreducibly first-person character. Even if you knew everything there was to know about a bat's neurology, its sonar, the biomechanics of how it processes sensory information, you still wouldn't know what it's like to be a bat. The subjective experience, the actual felt quality of batness, is inaccessible from the outside by definition. It doesn't matter how much data you have. The data isn't the experience.

The same is true of you. There is something it is like to be you. That thing is, structurally, inaccessible to anyone else. Full stop.¹¹

The converse (which is the stranger half of it) is that there is something it is like to be perceived by you, and that experience is inaccessible to you. The way your laugh sounds to someone else. Not the acoustics of it, the sound waves, the decibel level; you've heard those on recordings and they're always wrong in some way you can't quite place. The lived experience of hearing your laugh in real time, as the person it's landing on, whether it opens the room up or creates a small pocket of warmth or does something you'd be mortified to know about. Permanently sealed off. You will never get in there. The door doesn't open from your side.

I find this genuinely strange, in the way that word means before it gets dulled from overuse: strange the way certain facts are strange when you actually let them land, as opposed to just acknowledging them and moving on because the brain cannot sustain full contact with them without getting a little dizzy.

What it means, if you follow the logic far enough, is that you have been consequential in ways you can't audit. Every person who has encountered you has incorporated some version of you into their inner narrative, what Dan McAdams, who has spent decades studying how humans construct narrative identity, would call the personal myth, the ongoing life story through which people organize experience into meaning.¹² You have appeared in those stories as a character. Sometimes a minor one, an extra in a crowd scene. Sometimes, in ways you will never know, as something more load-bearing. The person who modeled a thing they'd been trying to figure out how to do. The stranger on a bad day who made it a less bad day without knowing. The name someone uses when they're trying to explain to a friend what kind of person they're drawn to.

This is not a sentiment. It is a logical consequence of the structure. You have been more present in the world than you've known. You have mattered, quietly and without receipt, in places you've never been able to see.

In other people's stories, you walked into a room once and said something that has never left them. You have no idea which room or what you said.

In other people's stories, you left at a moment they needed you and your departure became a whole chapter.

In other people's stories, you are a name that comes up occasionally in the context of something you forgot doing. "Oh, you know who's great?" And then your name. And then an anecdote you have no memory of and would probably not recognize as yours.

There's a thing that happens sometimes when you run into someone you haven't seen in years and they say something about who you were, some quality they observed in you that you'd forgotten you had, or forgotten you'd ever shown, and for a second you're looking at a reflection you had no idea existed. It's disorienting not because it's wrong but because it's right in a way you can't verify. They're reporting on a you that was there. That you left traces. And the traces have been sitting in their memory, intact and uncorroded, while you've been busy revising yourself into something you think is more accurate.¹³

My father once told me that he never really knew his father (my grandfather, dead before I was born, so I'm working from testimony here, which is already a version of the problem I'm describing) until years after his death, when he started talking to people who'd known him in his twenties. His old colleagues. People who'd met him before he was anyone's father, before he was the grandfather who existed in his account. He said what they described was a person he didn't recognize. Not wrong. Just not someone he had data on. They'd known the young-man version, unencumbered by the role he always saw him in, and what they described, the humor he apparently had, some looseness he'd never seen, was a person existing fully and sincerely in that period and invisible to him entirely.¹⁴

He'd been more present in the world than anyone who knew him in any single context could see.

And so are you.

I keep meaning to look at that photograph from my cousin's wedding. The one where I'm apparently comfortable. I keep not looking at it, and I've been trying to figure out why, and I think the honest answer is that seeing it would require me to update my sense of who I was that night, which is somehow harder than just living with the ambiguity. The photograph is not wrong. My memory is not wrong. Both are true, which means neither one tells me what I actually was, or whether that question (what I actually was) is the kind of question that resolves into a single answer.

It probably doesn't. Probably the better question is what I was in the room I remember, and what I was in the photograph, and who is carrying which version, and what that version is doing, right now, in some corner of the world I'll never visit.

The you that lives in other people's accounts of you is out there. Laughing in photographs. Appearing in stories. Being the reason someone decided something about kindness or consistency or what it looks like when someone actually shows up. You are more present than you realize. More consequential in ways that have been invisible to you since the moment they were generated.

That's most of what you are, actually.

The part you have access to is just the part you're holding.

¹ The phrase "doing actual work" is doing actual work here I want to acknowledge. The implication is that the version of me in that woman's memory is active, not inert. Which is maybe a stretch. Or maybe not. The question of whether a mental representation does work independent of conscious attention is actually a real question in cognitive science and I'm going to stop before this footnote becomes a literature review. ↩︎

² James put this in The Principles of Psychology in the chapter on the consciousness of self, published in 1890, which means he was working this out before most of the vocabulary we'd use to describe it today existed. This either makes the observation more impressive or means he was working at a level of generality where he couldn't be wrong. I can't decide which. ↩︎

³ The radio metaphor probably undersells the distortion, because radio signals at least travel intact and degrade predictably. What actually happens to your self as it travels into other minds is more like a game of telephone played by people who each have strong prior opinions about what you were supposed to say. ↩︎

⁴ There is a version of this observation that is very comforting, which is that maybe the outputs are the real you and the anxiety is just noise. There is a version that is less comforting, which is that the outputs have been shaped by the anxiety in ways neither the output nor the observer can see. Both of these feel true to me. Which is maybe its own kind of answer. ↩︎

⁵ Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life was published in 1959 and is one of the few works of sociology that reads almost like a novel, if you can tolerate certain passages where he sounds like a slightly formal uncle explaining how dinner parties work. The core dramaturgy framework has held up remarkably well, in the way that frameworks hold up when they're describing something structural rather than something contingent. ↩︎

⁶ This is technically true of your phone too, which is generating data about you at a rate you also cannot fully process, but the phone's data ends up in a server farm somewhere and the data about you that other people are generating ends up in them, which has different implications, most of which are harder to think about clearly. ↩︎

⁷ Cooley's 1902 formulation is often summarized as three steps: you imagine how you appear to someone else, you imagine their judgment of that appearance, you feel something in response to that imagined judgment. Which is already several layers of mediation before you've even gotten to an actual reaction from an actual person. The self that emerges from this process is built on a foundation of nested hypotheticals. ↩︎

⁸ There are exceptions to this, people who actively update their models of you over time, who ask questions rather than confirming existing impressions. These people are rare and valuable and worth keeping close. You know who they are. ↩︎

⁹ There's a reading of this that's melancholy. All these outdated versions, all this accumulated misapprehension, everyone carrying the wrong file. And there's a reading that's more like relief. They don't know about that thing you did from 2014 either. ↩︎

¹⁰ The paper is short, maybe fifteen pages, and is one of those rare pieces of philosophy that rewards reading even if you have no background in the field, because the question it's asking is one you've probably had yourself and just never found formal language for. It's also, and I say this carefully, genuinely funny in spots, in the dry accidental way that extremely precise thinkers sometimes are when they're being precise about something absurd. ↩︎

¹¹ Though I could be wrong about the "full stop" part. There are serious philosophers who'd argue partial access through empathy, or that the hard boundary between first-person experience and third-person description is itself a kind of philosophical artifact. These arguments are above my pay grade. But for the practical purposes of living an actual human life, the inaccessibility functions as real. ↩︎

¹² McAdams, who is a personality psychologist at Northwestern, has been developing this framework since the 1980s. The core claim is that identity operates primarily at the level of narrative, not trait, not role. You are the story you tell about yourself, and that story is always being revised. What I'd add is that other people are also telling the story, and their revisions happen without your editorial input. ↩︎

¹³ "Intact and uncorroded" probably overstates memory's reliability. Memory is reconstructive, not archival. The version of you that's sitting in their memory has also been revised, shaped by everything that's happened since, filtered through how they feel about you now. So the trace is real but it's not static. It's a living document that neither of you has full access to. ↩︎

¹⁴ She said this with what I now recognize was a kind of wonder, not grief. At the time I was maybe seventeen and mostly waiting for a natural break to leave the conversation. I have thought about it more since than I did then, which is maybe also a version of what this essay is about. ↩︎