Who am I to you?

Who am I to you?

There was a clear moment in life when I began to realize that people are not responding to me, they’re responding to who I am in relation to them.

The first time I really become aware of this rupture was when my dad died, nearly 12 years ago.
In the weeks after his death leading up to his funeral, people spoke warmly about a man I didn’t recognize. Stories of kindness, patience, generosity, an “amazing teacher”. And all I remember thinking was, I don’t even know who you’re talking about. Not because I thought they were lying or being disingenuous, but because the man they knew was not the man I knew.
To be perfectly honest this caused a deeper pain and grief than his passing ever did. Why didn’t I get to experience that man, the one they spoke of, the one they remembered?

Then years later, it happened again.
This time with a cousin, someone I have, at times, named as “evil”. When she was diagnosed with cancer, the outpouring was overwhelming. “Human sunshine,” they said. “Pure light.” I stared at the screen genuinely wondering if I had confused her with someone else.

That’s when something really shifted in me, and the awareness grew. And I got curious. Who are these people? Who am I?

Each of us is not one person moving through the world.
We are many.
And those versions are born in relationship to others.

Who I am with you is not who I am with someone else. Not because I’m fake, or pretending, but because the space between us asks something different of me. Different nervous system states, different defenses, different tenderness, different edges.
These create different reactions and quite literally different “acts”. Not at all intentional, but very real.

And I know this doesn’t only apply to others. It applies to me too.
There are people who feel warmth toward me. And there are definitely people who do not.

I am someone’s “human sunshine”, and I am someone’s “evil”, and a thousand different people in-between.

A friend once told me that being friends with me was like trying to hug a porcupine. Ouch!

Of the millions of things said in conversation over a lifetime, that one landed deep. It lodged itself somewhere quiet and enduring. I can still remember the exact feeling in my body, the collapse, the grief. Sixteen years later, the memory still carries weight, I can still feel it. Not because I believe it’s the whole truth, but because part of it was true, at least in that relationship it was.

I wasn’t easy to get close to.
Not because I didn’t care, or because I didn’t want to, but because closeness had a cost I didn’t know how to pay safely. And I often still don’t.

That version of me was/is real.
But it was not all of me.

Being seen as difficult, cold, sharp, or distant does not mean we are those things at our core. It means that in certain relational environments, our nervous system learned to protect first and soften later, or sometimes not at all.

So when I say, “I’m someone different to everyone. Who am I?”
I’m not asking out of confusion. I’m asking out of honesty and a recognition that I am indeed someone different to everyone.

I am the one who has been many things to many people.
Some gentle, some guarded, some wounding, some wounded.

And I am also the one who gets to stay curious about why.

Not to excuse, not to self-punish, but to understand the patterns that shaped me, and consciously see, which ones I am still choosing to carry forward.

Because identity isn’t a fixed point.
It’s a living, multidimensional, relational process.

And maybe the truest version of me can only exist in relationship to the one, God.

The Origins of Relationship

The origins of the word relationship itself offers up a clue.
It comes from the Latin relatio “a bringing back,” and relatus “to bring back, relate.”
Not a fixed thing, but a movement and action, a continual exchange between.

A relationship is not who we are in isolation, but who we become in reference to another. What gets called forth, what gets defended, what gets softened or sharpened in the space between two. We are “revealed” in relationship, not as a single, stable self, but as a living, changeable response.

Our learned patterns from early childhood are quite literally being brought back to us when confronted with the different energies of different people.

This is part of the work I now do in relationship with my clients. I help people to gently unravel the patterns that were once put in place to kept them safe but no longer serve them. Through somatic therapy, we soften the sharp edges, loosen the tension of holding on, and create enough safety in the body for something new to emerge. A new relationship with everything.

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*This is one of the many reasons why I am called to do somatic therapy.
Not to “fix” people, but to help ease and untangle the protective patterns that once made sense once, but have stayed too long.
When the body feels safe enough, the porcupine doesn’t disappear, it simply doesn’t need to wield it’s spikes anymore.