The Two Costumes
I removed two roles in the same week, and underneath both I found the exact same person.
I took off two costumes within the same stretch of days, and I did not notice until last night, sitting still long enough to put the pieces together.
Monday I delivered the school project, months of work built together with my wife, and for the first time in twenty five years of marketing I asked myself what remains of me when I stop producing. Wednesday, exactly sixteen years after our wedding, I lived an anniversary made of a superhero movie with the kids and a beer at the pub, instead of the elegant script part of me kept proposing. If you missed Wednesday’s piece, where I told for the first time what actually happened that day back in 2010 and what rereading it from here taught me, you can find it among the premium essays.
Last night, on the terrace, I put the two things side by side and saw something I had missed in each one separately. The marketer who delivers and the husband who celebrates are two different costumes, stitched in different decades, from different material, for different audiences. One answers to clients. The other answers to my wife. One measures results. The other measures moments. They can look like two entirely different people, occasionally even competing for the same limited time and energy.
And yet, when both costumes came off within the same day, what remained was identical. Not a tired marketer, not a satisfied husband. Something quieter and simpler than either, something that existed before I ever learned to do marketing, and before I ever learned to love someone in this specific, adult, complicated way, with children involved.
This is what no single role, however well performed, can ever give you on its own: proof that underneath every costume, however different they look, there is exactly one person wearing all of them. The roles change shape. The one wearing them does not.
In the BEING block of my morning, I am not trying to decide which role is the truest one among all the ones I play during the day. I am looking for whatever stays identical underneath every one of them, regardless of which costume happens to be on at that moment.
Today, look at two very different roles you play in your life, parent and professional, perhaps, and ask yourself honestly. Who, exactly, is wearing both.
Costumes change their name, their shape, their audience. Whoever wears them, underneath, stays the same, even when it struggles to recognize itself.