loud and proud of it

i just took this quiz on facebook called in your circle of friends, who are you? and i am the happy-go-lucky friend.  this is the description.

You are loud and proud of it. You don’t give a damn if the people on the street give you strange looks for laughing out loud or having a spring in your step. If life gives you lemons, you shrug and make sweet lemonade for everyone. Your friends don’t always get your no boundaries sense of humor and outlook on life, but they understand you and love you for it. However, because you refuse to take off your rose-colored glasses, you might not always be properly empathizing should your friends have problems.

i feel like this is dead on in most social situations, but it made me think.  let me start off by saying that i know that it’s a stupid quiz that doesn’t mean anything.  it wasn’t written by someone with a phd in social science.  still, i couldn’t help but contemplate my role when hanging out with various friends.  depending on the group that i’m hanging out with, i take on different roles.  i don’t know why that is.  perhaps different group dynamics change me.  i don’t know if this is a good thing or not, or if i’m being true to myself in adjusting my role within a group.

ultimately, i guess my question is this: does this happen to everyone?  when adding or subtracting one person in a group of friends, does the whole group dynamic change?  do all people change roles like this?  and if they do, does that make us all a bunch of fakes?  or do we make role adjustments for the benefit of the group?

i feel like there are so many sides to my personality, and hanging out with different people is an exercise in developing different facets of who i am.  so with all of these small parts of me being continually developed and tweaked and evolving in different ways, who am i on the whole?

if you could list every facet of your personality, would every part give an equal contribution to your identity?  are we the sum of all of our small parts equally contributing to the whole?  or are we more like pie charts, with more developed facets taking larger shares of our identity, with the smaller parts contributing very little to who we are?  i feel like it’s a little bit of both.  [this is a weird parallel i'm drawing here, but bear with me.  i guess each part of our personalities has the same kind of representation models as the legislative branch in the united states federal government.  the senate has equal representation for each state (or facet of our identities, if we're talking about drawing the parallel here), and the house is more like a pie chart that is weighted by population in each state.  both are important, but without both houses, each state in the country wouldn't have a totally fair representation.]

a final note: it’s strange how i can go a few days without feeling moved to write, and then the most minute thing will inspire me.