The Many Versions of You
The Hidden Exhaustion of Role Fragmentation
I want to give you a snapshot of a Tuesday.
8:30am: Platform operations. I’m the technical product manager — the one who knows the systems, tracks the dependencies, translates between what engineers are building and what leadership thinks is being built. I speak that language. I carry that frame. I am, in that room, a specific person with a specific job.
10:00am: Data architecture. Different team. Different problems. Different vocabulary, different risk tolerance, different sense of urgency. I recalibrate — tone, posture, what I foreground, what I leave out. I am still the technical product manager. But I am also a slightly different version of the technical product manager.
12:00pm: AI-native cybersecurity. The stakes are different here. The politics are different here. There is pressure from above about AI adoption, resistance from various directions about what’s actually safe to use, and a team that is watching carefully to see which direction I’m going to lean. I read the room. I adjust. I calibrate again.
Somewhere around 2pm, there is a decision being made several layers above me, about the teams I support, that I will not be included in. I will find out later. I will absorb the pivot.
By the time I get in my car at the end of the day, something strange sometimes happens: I’m not entirely sure which one I was.
We’ve talked about what context switching does to your brain — the switching cost, the attention residue, the three systems grinding against each other all day. We’ve talked about what it does to your body and your relationships and your sense of productivity.
But there’s a cost we haven’t named yet. It’s not about the tasks you’re switching between. It’s about the self you’re switching between.
Role fragmentation is different from being busy. Busy means you have too much to do. Role fragmentation means you have too many versions of yourself to maintain — and that you’ve been deploying all of them, simultaneously, for long enough that you’ve started to lose track of which one is actually you.
Every role comes with its own set of demands — not just tasks, but identity requirements. The way you hold yourself in a meeting with senior leadership is different from the way you hold yourself with your developers. The version of you that navigates organizational politics is different from the version that reads to your kids at night. The version required for an AI strategy presentation is different from the version that shows up for a hard conversation with a burned-out engineer.
None of that is dishonest. Adapting to context is a fundamental human skill. It’s how we function across relationships, across environments, across the wildly different demands a single life can make on a single person.
The exhaustion isn’t in the adapting. It’s in the accumulation. And it’s in what happens when the switching never fully stops — when you’ve been so many different versions of yourself across so many different contexts that the question who am I when none of this is required of me? starts to feel genuinely hard to answer.
That’s role fragmentation. Not overwork. Not burnout in the conventional sense. The particular depletion that comes from performing yourself, repeatedly, into people you recognize but don’t quite inhabit.
I’ve been listening to Brené Brown’s Strong Ground during commutes and late evenings when I’m too tired to read but not tired enough to sleep.
Brown’s central metaphor comes from athletics — what she calls the athletic stance. Knees bent. Weight pressing into the ground. Not rigid. Not braced against something specific. Just grounded — stable enough to hold, and ready to move when you need to.
The point isn’t that you won’t be pushed. You will be. The point is that you have a center to return to.
She calls it strong ground — the stable internal place that holds regardless of the external context. Not just a place to stand still, but a foundation you can move from. Not a refusal to play multiple roles, not a retreat from complexity, but a self that is present underneath all of it. Grounded enough to be steady, and grounded enough to move fast when you have to.
What strikes me about her metaphor is the distinction it illuminates between adapting to a context and losing yourself in it. Both look similar from the outside. Both involve calibrating to the room, adjusting to what’s needed, meeting people where they are. The difference is whether there’s still a you underneath the calibration — still something stable that the role sits on top of rather than over.
I’ve been sitting with the question of whether I have that.
The honest answer is: I’m not sure. I know who I am in each of the rooms I walk into. I’m less certain about who I am in the car on the way home, when the last meeting has ended and none of the roles are actively required.
That’s the part Brown’s metaphor keeps coming back to for me: strong ground isn’t something you achieve. It’s something you practice. You find it, you lose it, you find it again. The return is the practice.
There’s something underneath the role fragmentation that I want to name carefully, because it lives just below the surface of all of this.
My dad died in February 2024. I’m an only child. With him went the last of the people who had known me before any of these roles existed — before the career, before the company, before the versions of myself I’ve spent years learning to deploy. He was the person I could call who remembered who I was before I became all of this.
I’m not going to go deep on that here. There’s a later post for it, and it deserves that space.
But I mention it because it adds something specific to the experience of role fragmentation that I think is worth naming: the loss of a witness. The people who hold the longest view of who we are — who can look at all the roles and say, yes, but I knew you before any of that, and you were already this — those people anchor us in ways we don’t fully notice until they’re gone.
Without that, the question of which version of yourself is the real one can feel more pressing. More unmoored. More subject to whatever the most recent demanding context decided you needed to be.
Some days I think about quitting all of it. Not a specific plan — more like a recurring image. Forty acres of family land. Quieter work. Something physical and tangible, with results you can see and hold and walk away from at the end of the day. The farmer impulse, I’ve started calling it. The fantasy that comes when the roles have been running long enough that a completely different life starts to look not just appealing but necessary.
I’ve learned to take that impulse seriously. Not as a literal plan, but as a signal. When the part of me that wants to grow something simple and walk away from complexity starts getting loud, something underneath has been trying to get my attention for a while.
Brown would recognize it too: the farmer impulse is the sound of a self looking for strong ground.
Here’s what I’ve landed on, for now: the goal isn’t to play fewer roles. That’s not available to most of us, and it wouldn’t solve the problem anyway. The roles aren’t the issue. The disconnection from self underneath them is.
What I’m slowly learning — and I want to be clear that slowly is doing a lot of work in that sentence — is that strong ground isn’t a place you arrive at. It’s a direction you keep orienting toward. You notice when you’ve drifted. You feel the difference between being in a room and being of a room, between adapting to a context and dissolving into it. And then you come back.
The practice isn’t adding something to an already overloaded life. It’s noticing, in the small moments that exist even inside the packed days, whether there’s still a you underneath what the role is asking for.
That’s not nothing. Some days it’s everything.
I’m curious what your version of this looks like — the moment in the car, or the impulse to blow it all up and start over with something simpler. What is your farmer impulse telling you?
And here’s where we go next: what if the problem can’t be solved? What if role fragmentation, divided attention, the impossibility of being fully present everywhere at once — what if these aren’t puzzles that yield to a clever enough answer, but paradoxes that have to be lived with differently?
That’s Post 7. And Brené Brown has something precise and important to say about it.