Exhaustion of Being Multiple People Depending on the Room

You are different with different people. Not authentically different but strategically different. You adjust your words, your energy, your opinions, and your whole self depending on who’s around. With some people you are quiet. With others you are louder. With some you are helpful. With others you are independent. You have become a collection of versions instead of one consistent person.

The code-switching is automatic now. You walk into a room and you assess who’s there and you become the version of yourself that fits. The assessment happens so fast you don’t even notice you are doing it anymore. The changing happens without conscious thought. You are just different with different people and you have trained yourself to do it so seamlessly that nobody notices the switching.

What’s exhausting is that you never get to just be yourself. You are always performing the version that’s appropriate for the audience. You never get to express the full range of who you are because different parts of you come out for different people. The person who knows one version of you would be shocked to meet the other versions. The versions don’t know each other.

The fragmentation of identity that comes from this is real. You start to not know which version is actually you. All the versions have your face but they have different personalities, different values, and different ways of responding. You are so practiced at being what people need that you lose track of who you actually are when nobody’s watching.

The relationships become surface-level because nobody knows the whole you. The people closest to you know fragments. They know the version of you that exists around them but not the versions that exist around other people. The parts of you that would make you most known have to stay hidden because they don’t fit the version that works for this particular person or group.

What makes it harder is that some of the versions contradict each other. One version is confident and one version is insecure. One version is outspoken and one version is quiet. One version has strong opinions and one version doesn’t want to rock the boat. You are living as contradictory people and the contradiction creates internal conflict that exhausts you.

The real self gets smaller as the versions get more practiced. You spend so much energy being what other people need that you forget what you need. You become so good at adjusting that you lose the ability to be static, to be consistent, and to be the same person across different contexts. The fragmentation becomes so normal that you don’t recognize it as fragmentation anymore.

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