And how my own work/life balance isn’t much different.

**The following discusses, but not necessarily spoils the tv show, Severance. Whether you've seen it or not, this post is mostly about comparing the premise of the show to the similarities of life as a Stripper.**

 

 

After seeing a miniature Adam Scott typing away at a desk that’s seated on a larger version of his own head for the better part of a month, I became curious enough to investigate the tv show, Severance. S1E1 was offered for free, and I said, ‘fine, I’ll try it’. But what I didn’t expect was to begin bartering with myself if I could watch both seasons within a 7-day free trial, because I quote: “Cannot handle another email receipt from Apple”. Seven days and a rabbit hole later, here I am- piecing my own theories together and debating if I need to watch it all over again, just in case I ‘missed something’. Hint: I’m sure I did.

If you haven’t watched, or even heard of Severance, the premise is that mega-corporation Lumon created a procedure to sever one’s memories of work and personal life. The ‘Innie’ is the memory thread of everything happening inside the office, and the ‘Outie’ is the memory thread of everything happening outside. On the surface it seems like a good idea, because who wouldn’t like to just turn off work the moment it’s over? Diving deeper, we learn that the Innie having no memories of anything outside of the office, and the Outie having no memories inside it, creates a series of loose ends that are great for television, but problematic for the characters.

Now, I don’t want to give a full-fledged psychoanalysis on the show because A: I am not being compensated for it and B: this blog is heavily themed around the experiences of my own life. So what I am going to do is point out the patterns I noticed and how the idea of Severance is not too far off from how I separate my own work-life personas.

Throughout the show, I couldn’t help but compare the similarities of the Severed employees to myself. I had a lot of empathy for both the Innies and the Outies, likening them to my own dual personas- Coco and Courtney. I started looking at Coco as my Innie- incredibly charismatic, extroverted and energetic. Whereas Courtney -my Outie- is more skeptical, introverted, and reserved. Or is she?

The moments in the show where we see the severance activate in the elevator aren’t so different to the moments I switch between Coco and Courtney. Not activated by a place or a sound, but with a mental shift. My closest friends can attest to this- we might be out and something happens to activate the Coco within me, usually indicated with a quick-witted response or something toeing the line of appropriate for the environment. My life is a pattern of bright and flashing lights, loud music, performative intimacy followed by silent car drives home, hot and lengthly showers, and attempts to fall asleep before the sun begins to rise. My Innie will approach anyone and everyone, whereas my Outie just wants to be left alone.

The show’s Lumon wants you to believe that the Innie and the Outie are two separate entities -and honestly, there’s so much evidence to support that- my lived experience keeps bringing me back to the idea that the Innie and Outie are representations of the Id and Ego, and what’s severed is their connection. The Id is subconscious, while the Ego is partly conscious and subconscious. As you watch the show, notice how many ‘rewards’ there are for the Innies, and how as the viewer, they’re not impressive or even desirable. A Gift Card, an Egg Cart and a Finger Trap would not influence or encourage most people to complete mindless work- but the Id, that pleasure-seeking drive within us, absolutely wants those perks, especially without a connection to the Ego- the outside world and reality principle. Without the Ego, there’s no way to measure the appropriateness and value of such rewards. If I were to compare this to my own Innie and Outie, it would be like being offered a free house fee after a customer smacks my butt on stage hard enough to leave a handprint (read: physical assault). No, that’s not an appropriate consolation prize, but in dollar amounts, it’s upwards of $100, and in Stripperland, $100 will fix most problems pretty quickly. Now, if a person did that to my Outie, I would be calling police and pressing charges.

There’s also something to be said about how I know absolutely nothing about the Outies of my colleagues. If I bumped into one outside of work, I wouldn’t know how to address them, considering I only know their Innie names, and I sometimes don’t think I would even recognize them. Same thing about my clients. There are few I would recognize, and out of privacy and discretion, I wouldn’t choose to approach them.

Part of the reason I have longevity and resilience in my line of work, and probably why the characters in the show have too, is the ability to separate work from life. A self-severance, if you will. It didn’t come easily, and in the beginning, was fueled by shame and stigma, probably like how Adam Scott’s, Mark S. was fueled by depression and escapism. These days it’s simply a boundary. Returning to Lumon’s need for the Innie and the Outie to be seen as entirely different beings, it feels that pitting someone against themselves only fuels the chaos and inner torment that inevitably ensues, profiting only the entity that controls you. Which is why I constantly remind myself that “I can be both”.

There are always going to be days at any job where one might fantasize about quitting, but ultimately for both myself and the tv characters, as Mark S. says, “Every time you find yourself here, it's because you chose to come back.”