Why do I become a different person around my family?

Okay, I need to confess something.

I have a phone voice. Actually, I have like five. With my boss I’m calm, polished, “absolutely, I’ll circle back on that.” With my friends I’m louder, and I swear more. And with my mum? Give it four seconds. Four seconds and I’m fifteen again. My voice goes up, I start saying “Mamaaa” in a tone I would never use with any other adult, and when she asks if I’m eating properly, I can physically feel my eyes wanting to roll.

And it’s not just the phone. Anyone who speaks more than one language knows this feeling. In one language you’re funny, in another you’re polite, in another you’re a bit dramatic.

Same person, different software.

But nothing compares to actually going home. I walk in a fully grown woman with a job, a rent contract and opinions on champagne. An hour later I’m on the sofa, letting someone make me tea, quietly annoyed that my brother took the good chair. And I’m sitting there thinking… who is this? Because I don’t recognise her, but everyone else in the room clearly does.

Honestly, it used to freak me out a bit. Like, which one is the real me? Is the grown-up version just a costume I wear out in the world, and the second I’m home it falls off? Or is the fifteen-year-old the real one, and I’ve just been doing a very convincing impression of an adult for ten years?

So, as one does, I went to the nineteenth century for answers. And the first person who made me feel completely normal was William James.

William James is basically the guy who turned psychology into a real subject at university. Fun fact: his little brother was the novelist Henry James, so I can only imagine the family dinners. Two geniuses, one table, everyone correcting everyone’s grammar. And William spent twelve years writing a single book, The Principles of Psychology. Twelve years. I can’t commit to a phone case for twelve months.

In that book, he says this:

“A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind.”

I read that and kind of sat back. Because he’s not saying you have one self with a few different moods. He’s saying you have many selves. Everyone who knows you is carrying around their own little version of you. And when you’re with them, you sort of slip into it.

And then he gives this example, and I’m sorry, but it’s perfect:

“Many a youth who is demure enough before his parents and teachers, swears and swaggers like a pirate among his ‘tough’ young friends.”

A pirate. In 1890.

We’ve all been the sweet angel at Sunday lunch and the pirate at the bar on Friday night. Nothing has changed, we just have better lighting now.

So according to William James, I’m not fake at work and secretly fifteen underneath. I’m just a person with a lot of selves. And the reason the teenager shows up at my parents’ house is actually kind of simple: that’s the version of me they’ve been carrying around the longest.

They knew her first. So when I walk through the door, she’s the one who answers.

Which is sweet, honestly. And also a little bit frustrating. Because the grown-up with opinions on champagne is real too, and I’m not sure anyone at that table has met her yet.

Then I found Montaigne, and honestly, I think he’d be my best friend.

Michel de Montaigne was a French nobleman in the 1500s with possibly the most iconic childhood ever. His dad decided he should grow up speaking Latin as his first language, so everyone around baby Michel, his tutor and even the servants, was only allowed to speak Latin to him. He apparently didn’t really speak French until he was about six. Imagine being a toddler and your nanny’s only language is Ancient Rome.

Anyway, he grew up, became a judge, later became mayor of Bordeaux, and at 38 he basically said: I’m done. He retired to a tower on his family estate, filled it with books, painted his favourite quotes on the ceiling beams, and spent the rest of his life writing about… himself. His moods, his habits, his kidney stones, his opinions on everything. He called these pieces essais, which in French means “attempts.” He literally invented the essay. Every personal essay you’ve ever read online exists because this man went up a tower and started overthinking.

And the thing he kept noticing about himself was that he was wildly inconsistent. Brave one day, a coward the next. Generous in the morning, stingy at night. He’d say one thing and do another. And instead of panicking about it, like I do, he wrote an essay about it. In it, he says:

“We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game.”

And then he adds that there’s as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and other people.

I really love that. Because it means the question I was asking, “which one is the real me?”, might just be the wrong question. For Montaigne, there isn’t one solid “real you” hiding under all the different versions.

You are the patchwork.

The professional bit, the pirate bit, the sulking-about-the-good-chair bit: they’re all patches on the same quilt.

He has another line, later on, that I can’t stop thinking about: “I do not portray being, I portray passing.” He’s not trying to describe some fixed, permanent Montaigne. He’s describing someone who’s always changing, from one day to the next, one room to the next.

So when I walk into my parents’ house and turn fifteen, maybe nothing’s actually going wrong. I’m not losing the real me. I’m just switching to a different patch. The one that was sewn on first.

Which is very comforting, on paper. But I still don’t love it when it happens. Because there’s a little voice going: but isn’t it a bit fake? Shouldn’t a grown woman have one consistent personality by now?

And that’s where a big, bearded, very confident American poet comes in to tell me to relax.

Walt Whitman. Big beard, big hat, big energy.

In 1855 he self-published a poetry book called Leaves of Grass. He even helped set some of the type himself at a little print shop in Brooklyn. And then, and this is my favourite fact about him, he anonymously wrote glowing reviews of his own book and got them published.

Like, the man left himself five-star reviews. Iconic behaviour. No notes.

And then he spent basically the rest of his life rewriting that one book. Edition after edition, adding poems, changing lines, moving things around, until it went from a slim little collection to a huge one with hundreds of poems. He never settled on a “final” Walt. The book kept changing because he kept changing.

The most famous poem in it is called “Song of Myself,” and it opens with “I celebrate myself,” which is honestly the energy I want to bring to every family lunch. And near the end, he writes the lines I think about every time I go home:

“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

That’s it. That’s the whole answer. He’s not apologising. He’s not trying to fix it. Somebody points out he’s inconsistent, and he basically shrugs and says: yeah, of course I am. I’m a lot of people. I’m large.

And I love that, because it flips the whole thing. I’d been treating the different versions of me like a problem. Like proof that I’m a bit fake, or not fully grown up, or unstable. And Whitman’s like: no, babe. That’s not a flaw. That’s what being a full human looks like.

So. Why do I become a different person around my family?

Here’s where I’ve landed. William James says it’s because I have as many selves as there are people who know me, and my family knows the oldest version of me, so she’s the one who shows up. Montaigne says there was never one “real me” to begin with. We’re all patchwork, and the teenage patch is just one of the pieces. And Whitman says that’s not something to fix. It’s something to celebrate. I contain multitudes, and one of the multitudes really wants that good chair.

So I’m trying to stop panicking when the fifteen-year-old turns up. Honestly, there’s something kind of sweet about her. She gets fed. She gets looked after. Nobody expects her to answer emails. When else in adult life do you get to be that version of yourself?

But I’m also trying to bring the grown-up home a little more each time. Tell my parents what’s actually going on at work. Share an opinion at dinner instead of just sulking about it. Open a bottle of champagne and explain, very seriously, why I think it’s better than the one my mum likes.

Not to replace the fifteen-year-old. Just so my family can meet a few more of my multitudes.

Because they’ve been carrying the old version of me around for years. It might be nice to give them an update.

“I contain multitudes, and one of the multitudes really wants that good chair.”