Home self, work self

A friend of mine called me out last year for being less tolerant of ambiguity than he is, and wondered how I can be a good manager -- or get by at Zillian at all -- without greater comfort in the face of massive uncertainty (presented, at that time, by a thing in my personal/romantic life). My response was that work has PAID me, and paid me a lot, to hang in there. There's also a very specific kind of certainty at work: they pay me even when I have no idea what next month will bring, and it's also in everyone's interest to come up with some solution in which I'm happy and productive, unless the arrangement ends completely. Those are thoughts, and underlying certainties, that just don't apply in personal life.

I used the same argument about incentives, much more snippily, with a lover at around the same time: "yes I will put up with it, from Zillian. So. You can give me this kind of shit and pay me $X/month, or you can stop being avoidant and have the talk and figure out what you're doing." (He eventually stopped being avoidant and had the talk.)

So with all the difference in structure and incentive, it's true that my work self has finally diverged a bit from my home self. What you do changes you.

At work:

• I am more tolerant of ambiguity, of the relationship that may or may not ever right itself (though I won't give it more than a year, with anyone in my management chain). I have a taste for certainty that manifests as clear-ish priorities for my team, and inter-team boundaries that get written down. But I don't cut things off as early or as brutally as in my personal life, either.


• I'm more concerned about presenting a positive face to the world, because I'm very conscious of emotional contagion and of being a role model. It's my job, in many ways, to model how to get by in the corporation. I don't have that at home (I think some people do look up to me, but I don't feel the same obligation to stay on the pedestal).


• I've become more interested in smooth social functioning at work than in my personal life. That wasn't always the case. I used to do so much brokering of conversations in, say, acro/circus circles, getting people to understand each others' conversation styles and getting people to talk and ugh ugh ugh. That shit being my JOB now, I've actually stepped back from it in the outside world. I would be better at it now but I also do quite enough of it, thanks, I want my hobbies to be a break from that.

I wonder what else has drifted that I'm not thinking of.