Multitudes

We are all of us descended from creatures who—while figuring out how to feed and protect themselves in an oft-dangerous and unfriendly world—somehow found the time to invent poetry, trebuchets, the microprocessor, and Love Is Blind. We contain multitudes, in other words, but many of our social norms and internal pressures hobble or compress our multifarious natures, flattening our full complexity into something easier to label and organize. We thus end up narrowly self-defining for public consumption. We’re not not omnicapable: we’re an accountant. We’re a mother. We’re Disc Golf Guy. In reality even the most focused among us are far more than the labels we wear. Few mothers are just mothers, few disc golf enthusiasts never leave the course. These labels sprawl like over-stretched beach umbrellas, struggling to cover the full complexity of rich, varied lives. But our societies are set up in such a way that there’s little benefit to (or sometimes limited opportunity in) being all the…