Scattered Pieces of Myself

Do you often find yourself being a different person around different people? Like you've split yourself into smaller pieces that you only share with certain groups? (If you don't, please take those as rhetorical questions...) I think this is something a lot of us (all of us?) do to survive. We like to keep people as close as we need them without showing them all of what we are.

The simplest example of this is at work. You need to draw the line somewhere between the obsession you and your co-workers share about Battlestar Galactica and telling them about the time you got so drunk somewhere you passed out for hours. But where do you draw the line for the other people in your life?

I've been thinking about this more lately because keeping up these multiple personalities has become incredibly exhausting for me. I want to be myself with everyone, but people already know me a particular way. Somehow, showing them sides of myself they don't know seems like a violation of the unspoken rules in our relationships. I understand that I have to bend to people's comfort levels, but is there any way to start bending them back my way, if only a little?

Even as I write this, I'm self-editing to not give away too much of myself.

It is particularly challenging for the different versions of myself I spread throughout cyberspace. I write on a number of blogs, semi-regularly update Facebook and am addicted to Twitter. Somebody might be able to pull all of me together if they access all of these, but they might be surprised to what they find.

The strange part about it is that I don't purposely hide these sides of myself -- like I said, it's really rather exhausting. It's just the way the relationships have grown that I now don't know how to snap out of.

Does anybody else feel this way? And if you acknowledge that you have pieces of you scattered everywhere, is it something that bothers you or something you have gotten used to? Or am I completely insane and alone in feeling this way?