For the past week or so I have been watching Kill Me, Heal Me (2015), Korean drama and was totally fascinated with it. It had one of my favourite actors, Park Seo-joon, as Oh Ri On. But the main lead Ji Sung, as Cha Do Hyun got the juiciest part.
The comic relief scenes between Oh Ri On and Cha Do Hyun’s personality Ahn Yo Na, a seventeen something fangirl who is crazy about Oppas was done with fine craftmanship precision.
Have you ever noticed that you are never quite the same person twice?
You laugh differently with an old school friend than you do with a colleague. Your voice softens when speaking to a child. You become more patient with an ageing parent, more guarded with a stranger, more confident when discussing a subject you love. None of these versions are fake, yet none seems to tell the whole story.
This question found me unexpectedly while watching the Korean drama. On the surface, it tells the story of a wealthy young man living with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), a complex condition born from severe childhood trauma. The series blends comedy, romance, suspense and moments of deep emotional pain. It is not a perfect portrayal of mental illness, nor should it be mistaken for a documentary. Yet it asks a question that lingered long after the final episode.
What makes a person one person?
The drama gives one answer: seven identities sharing one body.
But I found myself asking a different question.
What if most of us already live as many versions of ourselves—not because we have multiple personalities, but because life itself calls forth different expressions of who we are?
Psychologists have wrestled with this long before Korean television. Carl Jung spoke of the persona, the social face we present to the world. It is not necessarily a deception; it is how we learn to live with others. Alongside the persona, Jung described the shadow—those parts of ourselves we hide, suppress or refuse to acknowledge. Healing, he suggested, is not achieved by pretending these parts do not exist, but by recognising and integrating them.
William James approached the question from another direction. He observed that each of us possesses as many social selves as there are people who know us. The daughter, the friend, the blog editor, the student, the neighbour—each relationship reveals a different facet of the same individual. Erving Goffman later compared everyday life to a stage, where we perform different roles depending on the audience. Yet even actors eventually leave the stage.
Or do they?
This is where I found myself thinking not of psychology, but of the Natya Shastra. Recently, I helped with an assignment from Dr. Ambika ma’am (RASA Trust Director and my employer), on a treatise of Music for Natya for Madurai R. Muralidharan, a composer and a dance exponent.
His discomfort at the limited material for dance began his long journey towards creating a library of works for Bharatanatyam repertoire. This paused me to explore those different roles that a danseuse play on the stage.
A Bharatanatyam dancer may become Krishna in one moment and Radha in the next. A male dancer may embody the longing of a nayika; a female dancer may portray Shiva’s stillness or Hanuman’s devotion. The body changes neither sex nor identity, yet the audience willingly enters each emotional world. The dancer is not pretending to be many people. Rather, they reveal that one human consciousness can contain tenderness, courage, longing, anger, compassion and surrender without contradiction.
Perhaps our everyday lives are not so different.
Maybe we, too, move through countless roles—not as an act of dishonesty, but as an expression of our shared humanity.
This is also why we must be careful when discussing mental health.
It has become common to casually describe someone as “having mental issues,” as though anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder and dissociative disorders belong in one indistinguishable basket. They do not. Each carries its own reality, challenges and lived experience. A diagnosis may explain certain struggles, but it should never become the entirety of a person’s identity.
The tragedy is not merely illness. It is what society often adds to it.
The labels.
The whispers.
The distance.
The assumption that a diagnosis somehow diminishes the person’s dignity.
When someone is mocked, feared or excluded because of a mental health condition, what happens to their sense of self-worth? If the world repeatedly tells them they are broken, do they begin to believe it? Or does something deeper remain untouched beneath society’s judgement?
Perhaps this is the question Kill Me, Heal Me quietly leaves us with.
Not “How many personalities can one person have?”
But “Can every part of a person be seen with compassion?”
Maybe healing does not mean reducing ourselves to a single, perfectly consistent identity. Perhaps healing is learning that our many roles, emotions and contradictions need not compete with one another. They can coexist like coloured pieces within a kaleidoscope. Turn it slightly, and the pattern changes. The fragments remain the same.
So, which version of me is the real one?
The answer, I suspect, is wonderfully unsatisfying.
All of them.
And none of them completely.
Because a person is not a single mask, nor merely the sum of many masks. A person is the quiet consciousness that moves among them, learning, growing, stumbling and beginning again.
So, when I saw the Korean Drama with an eye of an appreciator, I understood that the various roles that we drone and discard are actually a composite one person being various personhoods to raise up to the situation.
It is not surprising that we watch the various masks worn in the older form of theatre.
Perhaps the question is not whether we wear masks. We all do. The deeper question is whether we mistake the mask for the person beneath it—or whether, like great theatre, the mask sometimes reveals what the unmasked face cannot.
Credit: Born from Conversation with Mira (AI Powered ChatGPT)
Itinerant Storyteller 