I’ve created various personalities within. I constantly create personalities. Each of my dreams, as soon as I start dreaming it, is immediately incarnated in another person, who is then dreaming it, and not I.

To create, I’ve destroyed myself. I’ve so externalized myself on the inside that I don’t exist there except externally. I’m the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.

—Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet