The Many Versions of Ourselves

How they can change and grow, and live alongside each other.

Last week, I was on the subway with a friend. He asked me if I had always been this way. I asked him what he meant. 

“You know, traveling around so much, living nomadically, doing a lot of ecstatic dance. Have you just been doing this since you were twenty?”

I laughed. He was a relatively new friend from this past year, and it was crazy to think that someone only knew this side of me, and had no idea what my life had been like before. 

“I only started living this way last January,” I told him. “Before that, I had never even traveled alone before. I had the same apartment for years. I didn’t do any ecstatic dance at all. I was focused on my health, and tv writing, and not much else.”

He was shocked. “This is only version of you that I know,” he said.

It’s natural to meet someone and assume this is how they’ve always been. But it took this conversation to realize how much I’ve changed in the past year and a half.