If you asked ten different people who know me to tell you about me, you're likely to get 10 at least slightly different answers. The answers would vary depending on whether you spoke to someone who was just a co-worker, someone who was a co-worker but a bit of a friend, someone who was an acquaintance, or someone who knew me a bit better. You'd also get different answers depending on whether it was someone who spent more time with me in person versus someone who I interacted more with over electronic means. And you'd definitely get different answers if it was someone who knows me but who isn't necessarily friends with me.
We all show different sides of ourselves to different people, depending on the circumstances, the kind of relationship it is, how much we reveal of ourselves to any given person. We might be quieter with some people, more boisterous with others, more reserved with some, more brash with others, depending on our comfort level and how we might closer match with the personality of the other person. That doesn't mean you're showing a false version of you. It just means that different people bring out a different side of you.
In my case, while I think you'd get a range of answers, I don't think you'd find two people who would describe me using polar opposite words. Well, at least I don't think so. I guess you'd have to ask the people who really dislike me to answer that question, but I don't think that you'd get a Jekyll and Hyde description of me from two different people.
What made me think about this situation in particular is something that happened a few weeks ago. I ended up reading an article about someone I know. And the person described in the article was in fact not someone I know. I've never seen that person to exhibit those qualities in my interactions with them. While I didn't spend a ton of time with this person, I was around them more than just casually, and while I did note differences in their behaviour depending on who they interacted with, I was absolutely floored by the person as depicted in the story. The person in the story was kind, caring, compassionate, fun, easy-going, and seemed genuinely a good person to be around. While I'd seen a bit of that behaviour exhibited towards some people, I'd also seen the person be very negative, outright condescending, unabashedly rude, and sometimes, even vicious, and all of those things happened more than once, and more than to one person. And that was all before any of that behaviour was turned on me. It was actually because I started to notice that behaviour to others and started objecting to it that things changed, and eventually, their behaviour towards me turned into something I had to discretely manage. At the time that the person depicted in the article existed for the person writing the story, this same person was also in the worst part of their treatment towards me. In reading the article a few weeks ago and knowing the time period when that all was happening, and thinking about the behaviour that was directed towards me at the time, it was really hard to accept that it was the same person.
I suppose it shouldn't really come as a total surprise, since there are so many situations in the news when someone does something, and people they know are interviewed, and often, their response is that they would have never expected something like that, and they would never have expected that kind of behaviour from the person they knew. This situation isn't nearly on that level - no crime was committed towards me. But it was hard to reconcile the person I was reading about in the article with the person who had decided to target me. And while not a physical threat, there was a level of threat that it was possible the person could have inflicted on my life, given the nature of our interaction, and at times, it was problematic trying to figure out how to best avoid the land mines while still needing to make it across the field.
I think I was particularly aware of the difference in the perception of someone's personality because it's come up in other situations. Someone who comes across really nice and friend to all, but you know things about them that not everyone does, and it dampens how you feel. Or someone who might appear "odd" or difficult but you know something else about them so have more sympathy to overlook moments of them being less than gracious.
I was especially attune to these kinds of differences in many recent high-profile cases in many different arenas, where someone is accused of doing something terrible, and there are testimonials from others in their support saying that this person has never done that to them, implying that the person therefore could not have done it to their accusers. I've never understood that. If the person has never done this particular bad thing to you or in your presence, it means only that. You cannot extrapolate that to mean that they have not and cannot do it to someone else during the many hours in someone's life when you're not around. The example I usually use is that there are many people that high-profile serial killers met and interacted with and didn't kill. That certainly doesn't mean that they didn't kill the numerous people that they are convicted of killing.
While I know that different people have different perceptions of me, a realization that I accept, it's still interesting to think about it in terms of other people, especially when confronted with reading about someone you know and seeing a completely different person.
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