one or the other or the same?

it never ceases to amaze me that there are people which are very important to me just maybe because of some facet of their character which proves to be the helping hand or the stone to stumble over which gives me the needed direction for my next steps.
quite often these people are probably not aware of their good influence on me and not always i can tell them (either i do not even know them as they might have impressed me by there way of behaving in passing by, or at the time when their behaviour is influencing me it is painful and so i cannot yet show/notice my appreciation for it).

this phenomenon in itself fascinates me a lot already. but even more interesting i find how the roles in this play change depending on the people with whom i interact. maybe it is best to use an approximate example to explain my point. each person biologically has parents, some have siblings, and some later might have a partner and children. let's pick one person which is in this full family network. it is clear to see that this person then has a lot of different roles with respect to nearly all of the others: the one of a child, the one of a sibling, the one of a partner, the one of a parent.. all those being just different facets of the same person, and likely to influence one another.

so with people around it is similar. maybe the roles are not defined that clearly in terms of family concepts only (especially as the definition of friendship is very hard to be put down with precision; again i wonder if it is rather a matter of personal attitude or not..). nevertheless, there seem to be similar patterns: one person takes a certain role when relating to me; possibly a role which i cannot at first understand.

however, what recently has happened is that all of a sudden i find myself exactly in this 'other' role, being unexpectedly confronted with the inside view and challenges, when interacting with somebody else (whilst they might be taking on 'my' own old role...) summing up, the result is rather .. well .. i dont know if more frightening or fascinating. probably both. often it gives interesting clues about what other people might have gone through when having to put up with me.. and at the same time, it makes it a bit easier to understand what the other one in 'my' other skin is going through.

of course these are only hypotheses, and it is likely that i skipped some things which would make my flood even close to consistent. but could it not be that everyone is incorporating (consciously or inconsciously? nearly?) all different roles in their personality? and that discovering one after the other would lead them to finally get an idea about their own identity?