Curing Legion

Recently, I was challenged to consider how compartmentalized my life is. The question was something like, “are you a different person in different contexts?” I have been asked this question before. It's one of a number of similar questions I stopped answering several years ago because the people asking them tended to be more interested in my answer than they were in me.^[1]

So out of habit, I almost walked away when the question came up. But the questioner, Michael Spencer, had two things going for him: first, he started out by referencing C.S. Lewis, and even though Lewis is quoted an awful lot, I am usually curious to see how 21st-Century people apply his thought. Second, I regularly read Spencer's blog, and I have come to trust that when he asks a question like this, he is typically reporting on his own attempts to answer it.

Many who question compartmentalization characterize it as a coping mechanism, designed to simplify the problem of interacting with a diverse and disorienting world. The process begins by breaking that world into discrete, manageable chunks (or rooms, as Spencer calls them), like family, work, faith community, school, etc., each with its own history, rules, and goals. Then, in order to operate efficiently within a room, people develop distinct personas, tailored to meet the room's expectations, gain its acceptance, and participate in its activities.

I think there is a fundamental flaw in this model that must be addressed before it can be critiqued. As outlined above, it begins with a destructive process that reduces reality into rooms. But that is followed by an inherently creative personal process, in which separate, but essentially whole, selves are built and maintained. This is where the model breaks down.

Compartmentalization is fundamentally destructive on both sides of the equation; if the world is destroyed, so must be the person. Breaking the world into its component parts is like trying to take the flour out of a loaf of bread. You might find a chemical process that will do it, but the bread will be destroyed.^[2]

There is no subset of the world that is large enough to contain and explain the totality of a person: his or her body, history, beliefs, knowledge, work, etc. Imagine inhabiting a world that denies the existence of your family. In order to operate within that world, you must live as if you suddenly popped into being, fully socialized, educated, and loved. Like flour in bread, your family's influence, both positive and negative, cannot be removed without destroying you.

This is the dilemma of those who engage in compartmentalization; in order to gain access to their tiny rooms, they must fracture themselves into shards—partial persons—small enough to fit through the doors and superficial enough to operate inside. It is a costly and crippling experience. Fractured people quickly lose their integrity, their shards competing for dominance, then fading into irrelevance. At best, they become mosaics of themselves, two-dimensional, disjointed, and jagged imitations of wholeness. Relationships become shallow; love becomes dependence. Community becomes unsustainable.^[3]

My answer to the original question is that my life is indeed compartmentalized. I have agreed to live within distinct contexts, moving between them as needed, conforming to their expectations by fracturing myself, and accepting whatever benefits they provide in return. Like it or not, it is probably impossible to avoid some degree of compartmentalized living. But it is not without a cost, and I have struggled for some time with a growing awareness of that cost—my own disintegration. I have become Legion, and we are many.

As I look at the rooms I inhabit—my work, my neighborhood, my friendships, my church—I cannot deny that I am only a fraction of myself in any of them. My life is marked by unclear purpose, shallow relationships, and ineffective service. And I have become convinced that I cannot live a useful life, let alone a fulfilling one, without trying to heal those fractures.^[4]

So my return to this blog after almost two years is an attempt to reassemble myself and my world. I want to do that publicly and unapologetically, to imagine, through writing, how my whole self would act and react in a whole world. It doesn't matter that my whole world won't read this; what matters is that it could. And that every part of it would recognize me.^[5]

[1] This was usually within a religious context, where the person asking the question was attempting to persuade the audience to explicitly declare their faith outside the faith community. One's failure to make such declarations implied personal weakness or shame regarding the faith, which must be confronted and overcome. Bold action was emphasized over people, and the highest-priority actions were those leading to religious conversion or the advance of a moral agenda.

[2] This assumes that there is such a thing as a whole, irreducible self. This is an assumption that I ascribe to, although I also believe the self is mutable, and that it can maintain its wholeness in spite of change.

[3] I am speaking in very general terms. Doubtless, there are any number of exceptions where very fractured people have formed very meaningful communities. But my guess would be that a community of fractured people would only be successful by fostering new wholeness in its members.

[4] This is not to say that I do not have good friends or that I lead an entirely unfulfilling life. I just don't think my relationships, my work—my life in general—are anything like what they could be if I lived as an integrated person in an integrated world.

[5] Footnotes are in tribute to my friend Stan, who is the only blogger I know who uses them, and whose footnotes contain some of his most interesting, challenging, and fun comments.