The layered onion and parallel universes

A friend and I were having this discussion the other day about no one knowing us the exact same we. We are multiple personalities to multiple people to an extent that I think it’ll take some serious meditation for me to get to know ME. It’s like this layered onion metaphor that has been done to death one layer at a time. I’m not quite comfortable with comparing this thought to an onion, because honestly, once peeled, there is no way to put the layer back on the onion and also onions wither and die. While multiple facades are versatile - you put some on, you take some off, you mix and match, sometimes you reveal more and sometimes less, sometimes you add color and sometime make it monochromatic or stick with shades of grey. The permutations are so many that it’s almost impossible to create the same picture again.


So I’d like to think of them as parallel universes instead, not connected through a wormhole, but right there inside you. And one can pick the universe to be in at a point in time. You can flit in and out of them, escape from one to another and you don’t even need Lyra’s knife. There is no need for layers as the number of universes is infinite, so they can accommodate any number of your personality traits and create a new you. It’s the number of pictures that you create that makes a complex personality and that much more difficult to know YOU.

Sounds crazy? Maybe it is. But then, what isn’t :)