Stitched,not severed
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
-- Annie Dillard,
"The Writing Life"
There's a strange TV series called "Severance," where workers at the mysterious Lumon corporation have their minds surgically split in two: a Work Self (an "innie") and a Home Self (an "outie"), neither aware of what the other one does. It's a clean break, a partition in the brain. When you leave work, you really leave it. When you go to work, you can't remember the life you left behind. No messy overlap. No guilty checking of email at midnight. No half-attention to your kids at dinner while Slack buzzes on your phone.
Watching it, I felt weirdly jealous--and weirdly horrified.
Because that neat division is exactly what I don't have, and mostly, exactly what I don't want.
My work and home life intertwine like vines climbing the same trellis, twisting until it's hard to tell where one stops and the other begins. I work in an upstairs office in my house, with my dogs Rikki and Savannah sprawled nearby like furry beams of encouragement. They have no deadlines, no meetings, no Slack channels to lurk in. Their job is simply radiating calm, which they do effortlessly.
My human colleagues appear mostly as digital phantoms on Slack and email. I linger at the edges, smiling at in-jokes, occasionally joining the flow. Their conversations burble by like water over stones, weaving a low steady murmur. Sometimes it's thrilling--bright minds flickering in the ether--and sometimes isolating, like pressing my face against a window, watching a distant street.
There are days when work is all I want. Sitting at my desk, typing into the........
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