That’s a fancy word to start on isn’t it? Dichotomy.
Di-choto-my.
I imagine you can already perceive the impending mess of ideas rumbling towards the horizon, using words such as dichotomy is never a good sign in your average person, it implies too much thought.
Still, bear with me, it’s probably worth it.
I’ve been convinced for quite a while now that there is something fundamental about me that is – for want of a better word – broken. That is to say, damaged, not working. Not physically you understand, no, metaphysically*.
It’s difficult to describe though recently, in an effort to get my head around the concept, I’ve taken to thinking of it as being akin to a Matryoshka doll. On the outside there’s me, slightly odd and relatively harmless, and beneath that there’s another me, the one that has to be ignored and kept in check. Beneath him there’s the idealist, he who recoils from the world as it stands, and beneath him there’s… well, there’s a decidedly unpleasant me, the one who thinks killing career criminals would make for a better world, that if you start branding benefit cheats there’d be fewer of them. We don’t like him.
On and on it goes; good, bad, good, bad, good, bad, like the layers on an onion, until I’m no longer sure what lies at the centre. Which bothers me. It didn’t used to bother me; I used to be fine with the conflicting aspects of my personality, I used to enjoy the incongruous nature of believing the death penalty to be abhorrent while, at the same time, thinking that rapists should be shot. Now I’m not so sure.
The… we’ll call it doubt, though that isn’t the right word, started eighteen months ago when, in a moment of exasperation, my stepmother informed me that I was very hard to read, that I never display extremes of emotion beyond blustering about things that don’t matter (which can therefore be ignored) and that, outwardly at least, there’s little difference between James upset, and James happy.
Naturally I ignored this at the time, indeed I would have continued to ignore it were it not for a comment a few months later from a friend who described me as being ‘measured’ in my responses. On being pressed to elaborate they replied that I’m the sort of person who no one would suspect of being a murderer until I jammed a knife in their eye. Apparently there’s no inkling as to what’s going on in my head until I tell people.
They’re dead now.
No, I jest. They’re fine. They’re not alone either, a number of other people have made similar observations and lived and I think they’re on to something.
Does the constant duelling of reactions and emotions beneath the surface cancel out any sign of them on the surface and should it bother me if they do?
*Sorry, I just like playing with language and sometimes it makes me seem like an insufferable bore. Well, that’s assuming I’m not actually an insufferable bore in which case you can sod off. ^_^
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