I’m sure you are wondering why I picked aliases as a subject for this book, after all there are a lot more profound things to concern oneself with than a bunch of phony names. What I began to realize, however, was that there is a really big question here as well. For instance, you are one person to your parents and another to your friends and yet another to you husband or wife as well as your children. Perhaps you are somebody’s employee; certainly you are somebody’s colleague and maybe even somebody’s boss; every time your title changes so does the understanding people have of who you are and how you must be behaved toward. Additionally, if you are wearing those comfy jeans you feel yourself to be a more casual person whereas, if you are wearing a slinky cocktail dress or a tuxedo you feel anything but plain and casual.
Now we are talking about whom we are and that is a very old philosophical question. In fact, what I realized when I looked at it from the perspective of aliases is that the question is really: how many are we and, how does that add up to whom we think we are? Sometimes the altering factors are situational and sometimes they are internal. It seemed to me that all these images, some quite contradictory to others, needed to be looked at from a distance so we could try to make a more informed judgment. This book is dedicated to the principle that we are really many people and understanding that can help us all to better understand who we (and others) are in reality. After all, if you miss seeing an alias or two, you might not be able to really discover who you are!
