Selves Portrait

For the longest time my 2 selves have been kept apart. They’ve been binary – 2 states of existence that cannot occur at the same time. Let’s call the first one the ‘up’ self and let’s call the second one the ‘in’ self.

The outcome of this, this binary state of being – is that people only ever seen 1 side of me. It’s as if you could only ever see 1 half of a person – or perhaps, you could only ever see the front of them, and never the back. You never get the full picture. A bit like that game show Catchphrase – the one where the image slowly gets revealed as more panels are taken away. Often, the picture that’s being built up in the mind of the observer is not a true one – it isn’t showing the full story.

What if it wasn’t like this? What if we presented all the sides of ourselves to each other? How might that look? How might that change the conversations that we have with each other, how we treat each other?