I am living a double life. There. I said it. 

Maybe triple, or quadruple but honestly, who’s counting at this point? The thing is, I’m not ashamed of it anymore. In fact, I think we all do this, whether we admit it or not. Social media has just made us all more aware of how much we curate different versions of ourselves for different audiences. But I’ve learned something. Compartmentalization isn’t deception. It’s survival, and sometimes, it’s freedom.

I didn’t start out planning to live this way. Life taught me that vulnerability could be dangerous, that certain parts of myself were safer kept tucked away. Bad experiences have a way of becoming teachers, showing you exactly who you can trust with which pieces of yourself.

When I was younger, I thought authenticity meant being completely open with everyone. That naivety cost me, big time. I learned the hard way that not everyone deserves access to every part of who you are. Some people will use your vulnerabilities against you. Others simply aren’t equipped to handle certain aspects of your personality or interests.

So yes, trauma played a role in shaping how I navigate relationships now. But I’ve stopped seeing that as purely negative. Those difficult experiences taught me something valuable: self-preservation isn’t selfish, it’s pretty darn smart!

Take my work life. I’ve been dabbling in forensic stuff again lately, reconnecting with the circle of colleagues I started with years ago. It’s fascinating work, and I like helping. I feel useful when I do the mundane things nobody else wants to do.

At the same time, I’m still coaching clients through their weight loss and health journeys. That requires an entirely different energy, a different way of being present. The empathy and patience needed for someone struggling with their relationship with food and their body is worlds away from the analytical detachment required for forensic work.

And then there’s the writing. I used to write fiction, but it stopped feeling authentic to who I am. Now I’ve pivoted into something more personal. Not quite memoir, but a kind of super personalized self-help and practical guidance style of writing. It comes from someone who has lived through things, studied human behavior extensively, and learned hard-won lessons about how we actually work as people. This type of writing demands a different version of myself. One that can balance vulnerability with wisdom, and personal experience with broader insights.

These aren’t three different people pretending to be me. They’re three different aspects of who I am, each one genuine, each one thriving in its appropriate context.

Working on “The Other Side of Quiet” has had me reflecting deeply on all of this, on what made me who I am and how I choose to keep growing. The process forced me to examine not just my own patterns, but how society has dictated what’s “acceptable” when it comes to how we live.

There’s this unspoken rule that if you don’t share every detail of your life, you’re being dishonest. That if you don’t follow the prescribed order, you know the one…. get married to one person, have kids by a certain age, buy a house, climb the traditional career ladder…. you’re doing it wrong. If you rent instead of own, if your relationship doesn’t fit “conventional molds”, if your timeline doesn’t match everyone else’s expectations, you’re somehow failing at life.

It’s such bullshit. This rigid script society pushes isn’t just limiting, it’s suffocating. There are parts of my life that not everyone has seen or knows about, and some never will. Not because I’m hiding something shameful, but because we should be free to be complex, multifaceted human beings without having to perform our entire existence for public consumption.

The judgment that comes when you don’t fit the prescribed boxes is absurd. Why should my worth be determined by whether I own property or rent? Why should my relationship status define my success or who I am as a person? Why should anyone else’s timeline dictate how I live my life?

What really gets to me is watching people go back to the same people and situations that held them back, even after years of growth and distance. They’ll make progress, gain clarity, establish boundaries, and then somehow get pulled back into old dynamics that diminish them. It’s like watching someone voluntarily walk back into a cage they’d finally escaped.

I’m grateful that the introspection and accountability that came with writing what I’m currently working on has helped me see this pattern clearly enough to avoid it. When you’ve done the hard work of examining your own behaviors and choices, like really examining them and not just surface-level acknowledgment, you develop a protective instinct against regression.

My personal life reflects this same compartmentalized wisdom. I have a close circle now, but it’s really two halves that don’t necessarily overlap. Each half serves different needs and brings out different aspects of who I am.

I’ve ended friendships I once believed would be forever. Relationships that had become toxic, draining, or simply incompatible with who I was becoming. I used to feel guilty about this, like I was giving up too easily. Now I see it as healthy boundary-setting. 

On the flip side, I’ve maintained and deepened relationships I thought were destined to stay in the past. Someone from my past who I once thought I’d lost forever has become something I never could have imagined. Much deeper, so much more meaningful, and way more essential than what we had before. It’s proof that sometimes the most profound relationships are the ones that can survive transformation, status, distance, and time.

When I started studying human behavior more seriously, I realized this compartmentalization isn’t some crazy and modern dysfunction, it’s actually ancient wisdom. Our ancestors understood that different situations called for different aspects of personality. Identity was fluid, contextual. You could be brave in one setting and vulnerable in another without anyone questioning your authenticity.

Somewhere along the way, we got this idea that being “real” means being exactly the same in every context. But that’s not human nature at all. That’s just bad social (media?) philosophy mixed with society’s obsession with putting people in neat, predictable boxes.

What I’ve discovered is that compartmentalization can actually be a form of generosity. By not burdening every relationship with every aspect of who I am, I’m allowing each connection to be what it needs to be without the weight of expectations it can’t possibly meet.

My forensic gang doesn’t need to pretend to have interest in my clients’ personal breakthroughs. My coaching clients don’t need to understand the intricacies of evidence analysis. My editor doesn’t need to hear about my crazy love life. My writing process doesn’t need to be fully understood by everyone in my world.

This isn’t about hiding. It’s about honoring the specific gifts each relationship offers and the particular needs each context serves.

Perhaps the most profound shift in my thinking has been around trust. I used to see it as all-or-nothing. Either I trusted someone completely or I didn’t trust them at all. Now I understand that trust exists on a spectrum, and different people can be trusted with different things.

I can trust my editor with my writing but not with my romantic problems (there aren't any anyway 😛). I can trust my trainer with motivation but not with professional confidences. I can trust my family or best friends with unconditional love but not necessarily with understanding all my life choices.

This graduated approach to trust isn’t cynical, it’s realistic. It acknowledges that people have different strengths, different capacities, different levels of interest in various aspects of life.

The more I study human behavior, the more convinced I become that we’re all beautifully, necessarily complex. The idea that authenticity requires complete transparency in all relationships is not just unrealistic, it’s actually counterproductive to genuine connection.

Some of my deepest relationships are with people who’ve never met certain other important people in my life, who don’t know about certain interests I have, who’ve never seen particular sides of my personality. That doesn’t make these relationships less authentic. If anything, it makes them more focused, more intentional.

I’m not apologizing for living what others might call a double life. I’m done pretending that human beings are simple enough to be fully known by any one person or fully expressed in any single context. I’m done following society’s script about what my life should look like and when. And most importantly, I know some people will make up their own stories about me, and that’s fine. Their opinions don’t belong to me.

Instead, I’m embracing the multiplicity. The forensic specialist and the health coach and the writer aren’t separate people, they’re facets of one complex human being who’s learned to honor different aspects of herself in different settings. The relationships that have evolved in unexpected ways, the boundaries I’ve set, the unconventional path I’ve chosen…. these aren’t failures to conform, they’re successes at being authentically myself.

This isn’t fragmentation. It’s integration done wisely, with boundaries that protect rather than divide, with compartments that organize rather than isolate. Writing “All These Beautiful Things” taught me this lesson in a pretty profound way, as I learned about my own mother’s life, I discovered all these pieces that made up who she was, some things I never even knew. It made me realize that we all contain these hidden depths, these various chapters and aspects that don’t always intersect but are all equally real and valid.

It’s the freedom to be complex, to grow, to change, to exist outside the suffocating boxes society tries to put us in.

Maybe the real authenticity isn’t about being the same everywhere or following everyone else’s timeline, maybe it’s about being genuinely yourself wherever you are, recognizing that “yourself” is vast enough to contain multitudes, flexible enough to adapt to different needs, and brave enough to reject the narrow definitions others try to impose.

The double life isn’t deception. It’s depth. It’s freedom. We all need more of it. Fear planted the seed. Defiance and frustration rose like armor. Pride and gratitude bloomed. Longing keeps the heart tender. And liberation? Always, it points home.