Carcosa

"It must've been very hard
To have lived and never learnt
To be content with who you are
We all want the same things don't we?"

["Forever Can Be", ASHES dIVIDE]

I feel sometimes as though I exist now in two parallel worlds, as two parallel Patricks.  On the surface, they look the same.  But they are not at all the same.  It's a bit like the failed TV series "Awake", but in my case there is no doubt that both worlds are quite real.  I am not asleep.

One is the world I was raised in.  Patriarchal.  Capitalist.  Religious.  Often misogynist.  A world of politics and business, where it's all about agency and power dynamics.  For lack of a better term, "the world of men".  (Rich, white ones.)  A world where profits and performance are important.

The other is the world that's has been revealed to me in recent years as I've worked to broaden my views.  Leftist.  Inclusive.  Socialist.  Feminist.  A world about people and how they socialize.  A world struggling working to find balance and comfort and fairness.  A world where work-life balance and mental health are important.

I spend most of my professional life in the former.  I spend as much of my personal life as able in the latter.  It's a bit like Yin and Yang.  I'm reminded of the old Taoist proverb: know the role of the male, but stick to the role of the female.

I found myself this morning reflecting on one of the latest challenges put before me at work, thinking about it in a very... philosophical way.  A religious way, one might even say.  I thought about these two worlds in which I dwell.  I thought of how much I've grown and changed and evolved and adapted over time.  It was not always in the right directions, and it dawned on me that one of the most difficult and challenging things I ever faced in life, one of the biggest things I ever learned, never made it into my "Treatise on Life" because it never happened until my 30s, and oddly, I never thought to include it in either of my Appendix entries in 2020 either.

I've written before about the "journey of self-discovery" and how much value I place on self-awareness.  I've also talked about how - as fruitful a journey as it is - it's also sometimes a difficult one.  While it's my hope that anyone brave enough to really put themselves under a microscope and come to a fuller understanding of themselves will ultimately come to a peaceful self-acceptance, recognizing the bad, and sometimes unchangeable (or not easily changeable) things about oneself can be difficult.

But we all grow, and change, adapt and evolve.  We do so in reaction to our changing environments, our changing worlds, and our changing relationships.

When we find ourselves in toxic, dysfunctional relationships, it's normally because it's happened "an inch at a time".  We didn't dive headlong into something obviously bad for us.  We started in something good but just ever so slightly tainted, and which drifted, little by little, until we wake up one day and wonder how we've gone so far astray, and what we can do - if anything - to get back to good.  This is true of friendships, of romantic relationships, of employer-employee relationships, and... for the self-aware, for the relationship with ourselves.

One day, long ago, I realized that in response to a particularly difficult time of my life, in adapting and changing and evolving and simply surviving...  that I had become someone I did not wish to be.  Not only was I in a toxic relationship, but that I had become a toxic person in response to it.  I had become someone terrible.  On the road back from hell, I had to train myself, to work at leaving the baggage behind, in order to get back to being a better person, to being someone I loved, someone I respected, someone I was comfortable being.

So a few days ago, when this philosophical line of thought came up, I was reminded of "The Prophet", when Gibran spoke of crime and punishment saying "...even as the holy and the righteous cannot rise beyond the highest which his in each one of you, so the wicked and the weak cannot fall lower than the lowest which is in you also."  There's a difference between being capable of operating in both worlds and being comfortable operating in both worlds.  I know the sorts of things I'm capable of.  I consider myself capable of terrible things.  I don't choose them.  I'm not comfortable or willing.  At my age and agency I'm seldom forced to make terrible decisions in order to survive or even thrive.

I grow less and less comfortable operating in that old world all the time, because my heart is in the new.  We are navigating changing social and political ideologies, and I'm not one of the dinosaurs clinging to the past.  But these dinosaurs hold the power.  They still control things.  Social change is an evolution not a revolution.  (To reluctantly quote Paglia.)  I still deftly vacillate back and forth as required.

Being less and less comfortable with this all the time is not a bad thing, but a good one.  I expect I'll make it to retirement without theses parallel words inverting, but on the off chance I find myself needing to move on to a different environment before I do reach that age, I chuckle at the thought that when inevitably asked in a job interview why I'm out looking, I imagine it would raise a few confused eyebrows when I respond:

I have become uncomfortable with my current role within the social fabric.