Split Personality Order
In a few moments we're born, we're identified by a name. Eventually made to live with this identity for a lifetime. In a few years, we earn more tags with several identities like our professions, characters, expertise, relations, etc. Taking a step back, I realize there are enough identities earned and a lot more to earn.
When we're grown up and into jobs, lot of people think of work-life balance. The general interpretations of professional life is office work and of personal life is family, friends, etc. The time spent with both in a well balanced fashion, is almost necessary. But the interpretations are incorrect, in my opinion. Professional life further has categories like Office, Family, Friends, etc. Personal life however, is only about the person. It excludes everything, even feelings about other people.
When I was in forest, I only had to enjoy the nature. If I had to remember a beautiful moment spent with my father a few years ago, in the midst of a dense forest, I wasn't living my personal life. I was, rather living a professional life where I gained love.
In a recent solo backpack trip in a few forests, where there are almost no people, I've realized every human has a split personality order. We just don't acknowledge it in our daily lives. All our life is nothing but a tree of identities. Our name being the topmost identity, our professions, relations and others being branches of the tree. Leaves of the tree are where we spend moments of our life. The leaves are fascinating for a reason, they wither with time and live short life.
The trunk remains invisible. We swing from branch to branch—son at breakfast, employee by nine, friend at lunch, stranger on the bus. Each identity has its script. We perform them so naturally we forget we're performing at all.
Personal life is when we climb down from the tree entirely. It's standing in that forest with no role to play, no one to be. Not documenting for others, not reminiscing, not even thinking about thinking. Just being. These moments are rare. An hour here, ten minutes there. They feel like floating because we've grown so used to the weight of our identities.
The leaves fall and new ones grow. Moments lived through any identity become memory, make room for what's next. That conversation with my father is a leaf now—beautiful, but I cannot live in it again. This is the nature of all our moments.
We are not one person pretending to be many. We are many persons held together by a name, by the story of continuity. A son, an engineer, a friend, a stranger—all real, all temporary. The tree is comfortable. Its branches have worn grooves where we grip them.
But sometimes, in the silence of a forest, we remember. We are the tree, yes. But we are also the space around it. The wind through branches. The silence between names. And in that moment, brief as a leaf's life, we touch something true: beneath all these identities, there is someone who simply exists. Untagged. Unnamed. Free.
This is the split personality order. Not disorder, but the structure of how we live. We are many because we must be. We are one because we choose to be. And personal life is the rare moment we remember the difference.
