The Multitudes in Us

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I must have been about seven.

It was a gray Sunday in Spring. My mother, older sister, and I had just finished breakfast at Lakeville Bagels near our house on Long Island. As my mother paid, my sister and I waited by the door. It had started to drizzle. Wanting to make my sister laugh, I went outside and started to dance around and sing “I’m singing in the rain.”

“Dance” probably isn’t the right word as I was just hopping around and shaking my arms in the air. I looked like a crazy person. This went on for about 15 seconds before a middle-aged man exited the bagel place, took one look at me, and said:

Act like a man!

It sent my sister and me into hysterics. I stopped dancing and ran back inside. It became a default joke for my sister and I. From time to time we’d giggle about it, snapping at each other to “Act like a man!”

Two dozen years have passed since my rain dance outside Lakeville Bagels but I feel like that moment was a fascinating encapsulation of what my future would be. So much of my identity growing up was a precarious and largely unsuccessful balancing act between acting silly and acting like a man.

Because they don’t really seem to be parallel paths.

I have always wanted to be both funny and serious, and to be perceived as both. Merging the two is challenging. If somebody spends all their time trying to make others laugh, when they finally do say something serious, who would want to take them seriously?

When I was younger it constantly frustrated me to be seen as one dimensional. I hated being pigeonholed. I felt angry when others didn’t take me seriously. I didn’t realize our behavioral history is context. When one sets a precedent for behavior, it becomes extremely challenging to change others’ perception.

I probably would have found it much easier to be a serious person who makes the occasional joke. Or I could have just not tried so hard or cared so much.

As if those were options.

Our perceptions of other people are often created quickly. We are almost always, myself included, categorizing people. It is not for nefarious purposes. We evolved that way. It helps us to make decisions faster so we don’t have to investigate every single new piece of information we come across. It helps us contextualize the world around us.

But there has always been this duality in me, and if I reflect on it further, it’s more than a simple duality. My interests are varied and sometimes unique to each other. What fascinates me and what I pursue may not always seem logical within the same person, or even practical for that matter. I make no claims the sensation of these disparate selves are of great profundity or importance. They simply coexist within me with varying degrees of harmony.

Walt Whitman has a quote that speaks to me deeply.

“Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

To me, the idea of containing multitudes is so beautiful, so honest. I feel the concept is greatly overlooked, both in the way we view others and ourselves. We are so desirous of consistency, of delivery, of reality matching our expectations on a singular plane. We do better with the word “or” than we do with the word “and.”

We struggle to hold conflicting ideas in the same hand. However, the ability to do so is important for a more profound and comprehensive understanding.

Being a person is hard work. To experience the full spectrum of the human condition is indeed challenging. It requires patience, focus, persistence, and a whole bunch of other elements I haven’t figured out yet.

I think at the core we are all trying to simultaneously figure out who we are and be that person. Which makes the advice “Be yourself” absolutely maddening. How does one be themselves when that self constantly changes, evolves, and is still a mystery?

I have always been fascinated by those people who just seem to know themselves innately. For better or for worse they know what they want, what they can handle, and what they can’t. They have fully committed to that existence. Meeting somebody like that in my teens felt like I was meeting an alien.

Meeting somebody like that in my 20s made me envious. How did anybody come to such innate knowledge? How did they become so comfortable in their own skin? I wanted to know where they came from, what they did, who their family was. I wanted to intern for them.

Rich Boehmcke: Human Intern.

And now, into my 30s, the whole idea of being a person is so strange to me. Yes, it sounds like a stoner thought. I’ve spent so much time thinking about it without the aid of illicit substances that broaching the subject now becomes its own psychedelic trip untethering my mind and sending me into an existential black hole. I keep wondering how anybody becomes anybody.

It’s mentally exhausting. I can’t even tolerate listening to myself think about it.

I think back to my bagel dance and the idea of acting like a man. It really does feel like so much of growing up is just acting the part. Man or woman, adult, parent, or professional. There is an element of acting, of performance, to all of it. Many successful people have told of their own experience “acting as if” in order to make it through situations of increasing significance they felt unqualified for.

The challenge though is I think some of us spend so much time “acting as if” we forget who we truly are. Our lives become a performance, whether for others, ourselves, or a combination of the two.

As we now capture all moments of our lives, we feel a greater onus to perform. Be it our happiness, our frustrations, or the narrative we which choose to portray. We are all acting as if. Through photos. Through hashtags. Through the brands we wear and the places we go.

I am the kind of person does X.

It seems like growing up in the age before the internet meant you had a much smaller pool of candidates from which to model your behavior. It feels decidedly less specific now. More chaotic.

I was speaking with somebody recently who talked about our lives being like sourdough starter, greatly influenced by everything in the air around us, heavily dependent on our environment, some of it more impactful than others. In some ways it is beautiful, our lives being influenced by life itself. But in some ways it is scary. So many different elements have the capacity to change the shape, nature, and flavor of our lives.

That being said… Are we becoming who we want to be or who we think we need to be? Have we given ourselves enough time to figure it out? To understand it?

Jim Carrey has a fascinating quote in the documentary “Jim and Andy” where he says:

“At some point when you create yourself to make it, you’re going to have to either let that creation go and take a chance on being loved or hated for who you really are, or you’re going to have to kill who you really are and fall into your grave grasping a character you never were.”

The quote is intimidating for sure. But like Whitman and the sourdough analogy, I find it so beautiful and true.

And that is my favorite part. The beauty in the truth. Which brings us back to ourselves, our creation of, and performance of that self, at any age.

There is beauty in truth. There is beauty in who we are at our core. There is beauty in our multitudes.

Discovering and sharing those multitudes is worth the effort.

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