Persona

Part of the problem with the previous tenants was a matter of identity - to me, they were just tenants, two-dimensional, largely unseen characters whose sole purpose in life, as far as I was concerned, was to send me monthly rent checks.  To them, I was just as two-dimensional and just as unseen - I was that demanding landlord whose sole fixation was to get the rent payments as quickly as possible,  

It's no wonder, then, that they felt it was acceptable to leave the place in the state that it was in.  They had little conception that on top of being their landlord, I was also a workaholic full-time career man, a stressed-out urbanite, and a burned-out, exhausted introvert.  In their view of who I was, why wouldn't I have time to haul away all their trash and clean up their filth?  What else was there to my life other than managing their rental unit?

I realize that I also have a myopic vision of who they were and what they thought.

But all this ties into a larger concept I've been thinking about lately.  We're all actually many, many different people to the many others in our life.  We might be a parent as far as children are concerned, or a loving (or not) spouse to our loving (or not) partner.  To the person in the car behind us in traffic, we're the doofus who won't move his car after the light has changed.  To the cashier at the supermarket, we're part of that horde of daily customers, and to our coworkers, we could be any of a limitless number of things.

The truth of it is that they're all right - we're all those things and more.  We don't have a single identity, and we're certainly more than the star of that self-narrated personal history that we tell ourselves.  That narrative is only one more person's opinion, our own, but it's just as unreliable as any of the other identities.  

We are not one single person. In the relativistic sense, we're an infinite number of possible persons, depending on who is asking and where we might happen to fit into that other person's narrative.

So it was with great interest that I read the quote below by philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan (my old job).  In an article about her in The New Yorker, Professor Anderson told the reporter,

"At church, I'm one thing.  At work, I'm something else.  I'm something else at home, or with my friends.  The ability not to have an identity that one carries from sphere to sphere but, rather, to be able to slip in and adopt whatever values and norms are appropriate while retaining one's identities in other domains?  That is what it is to be free."       

The brilliance of that quote isn't that it recognizes and acknowledges our multiple identities, but it proposes that instead of insisting we are who we think we are, liberation is found in accepting these multiple identities and freely moving from persona to persona.