Double life

Double life is a bad thing - synonymous of being duplicitous! If one has another self, one can't be trusted - as we won't know what their real intentions are. 

I find this logic problematic. Having a double life, for me, could be living two lives, both equally real. This is the opposite of being duplicitous, as that assumes only one 'real' self is possible. 

But, I argue, that in the modern life, either no real self is possible, or an infinite number of equally real selves are possible. As we live inside stories scripted by others, it will all come down to how we define 'real'. If this means authentic, as one is, this may not be possible: Put my phone in my hand, and I am already different from who I am! If 'real' means enduring, one could say that they have many enduring selves, which manifest when circumstances for them emerge. Nothing dies in the digital realm, if we come to think of it, and those selves may endure even after our physical selves have withered away.

Of course, the question - even if two selves are possible, can one live them simultaneously - is a valid one. Perhaps not: I am a different person when I write poetry than when I am presenting PowerPoint, but I don't do it simultaneously. That way, one can't really live a double life - 40 years of being a novelist PLUS 40 years of being a bureaucrat - it is likely to fractional: To some degree a bureaucrat and to some degree of novelist, but a total of 40 years of being Kafka! 

But that really confusing lifespans with life itself. For each file being signed, each memo being written, the artist never stops being an artist. Same could be said of a bureaucrat, even when they are drinking. Life is what spans everything, all body, all time, all mind! It is not an identity either: Whether you know me as a businessman or as a romantic poet, those are immaterial. Identity is for other people. Life, on the other side, is everywhere. My presentations hold secret signatures of poetry, and in turn, my poems talk about life as it's lived.

What I am trying to prove that one can live double lives well. Lives are stories, and it is possible to have two stories. Simultaneously. That one 'real' self is the official story: It is what the government, church and our institutions wish us to be sublimated to. The multiple lives is where subversion starts - the possibility that I can diverge from my official story is very much the first step of being. Therefore, I shall argue, there could be no self, only selves; no life except lives; to be real, one must accept the possibility of refraction. 

Here comes me. I have forever lived a double life, with a sense of guilt. I have always done whatever was expected of me: I was, as I wrote in one of my poems, 'responsibly restrained'. My life has been the official version of me. Subversion - with its implicit incitement of violence - wasn't for me. When I rediscovered writing poetry, late in my life, I saw it as a part of middle life crisis: Being pulled by powerful emotions, which happened to coincide with the death of a parent! But as I allowed it to grow, I see that it was not an aberration of life. It was a feature. That invitation to writing was always there, but I was too afraid. It was denial and cowardice that made me not write, not to acknowledge my emotions, which were as authentic as my dry-cleaned self. It was not a moment of starting to live a double-life; it was the start of living itself.