Lockdown Letters

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Difficultator

"I yam what I yam and dats all what I yam"
— Popeye the Sailor Man

We go to the stores, and the shoppers all look like bandits, their features hidden behind masks, faceless bodies milling around. We go online to meet our work colleagues and all we see are faces. No bodies. So between the two activities we get something resembling whole people. Except we don't. The whole is greater than the sum of it's parts and we're currently dwelling amongst just parts, disconnected, unrelated, unwhole. At least, that's how I experience it. I'm in rather a negative space, not unaffected by this isolation.

It's now been four months since I did any work, and I'm nervous about returning—not even returning, more like restarting. Life is very different. I enjoyed my three months' sabbatical, kicking back, doing very little, observing from a distance. But this past month of ramping up for work again I have enjoyed much less. I feel a little fraudulent, out of integrity. I've set up a few online workshop sessions for this month but I must say I'm not thrilled with the idea. Mildly intrigued perhaps, uncomfortable certainly. And sad. Maybe it's an age thing, a different life experience, but I don't believe this is how humans are meant to interact, talking heads on flat screens. Nor, come to that, as faceless bodies socially distancing. I don't belong in either space. And yet I must do my best.

I've spent much of my life feeling that I don't fit in. For many periods of time this has in fact been true, and reasonably so. Active alcoholics and drug addicts do tend to exist on the margins of society, inevitably. But even beyond that, within recovery and leading a relatively normal life I have the feeling of not quite belonging. I've never found my category, never established my boundaries. I am a vagrant wanderer. This non-belonging even plays out in such mundane ways as not knowing how to describe the work I do.

The "what do you do?" question terrifies me. There was a short time in my life, 2000-05, that I wrote code for a living. I was a coder, or a programmer. That was simple. I had an answer to the question that allowed the questioner to place me in a suitable box. We humans like our categories. Prior to that time, and since then I haven't had such a simple answer. People tell me I am things, like trainer, coach, consultant but none of these titles resonate. I've held on to facilitator for several years, but even that term bothers me. It means "to make easy" and I reckon that's about the last thing I do in anyone's life.

It was with some joy then that I rediscovered Augusto Boal's term difficultator this month. In Theatre of the Oppressed there is a non-acting role known as the Joker.

"The joker's function is not that of facilitator, the joker is (in Boal-speak) a difficultator, undermining easy judgments, reinforcing our grasp of the complexity of a situation, not letting that complexity get in the way of action or frighten us into submission or inactivity. Things aren't always what they seem, it says; let's try and do something about them." 

This description resonates with what I do—or at least what I try to do, i.e. get people out of their comfort zones. Not make things easy. I like it also as it's not restricted to workshop settings but potentially expands to a whole life philosophy. Things aren't always what they seem, let's explore, let's break this thing open and see what's really going on. Something like that. I'm sure if you had a chat with a few people I've been in relationship with over the years, family, friends, lovers, they'd agree that I made things difficult—often very difficult! There's a positive and negative side to everything, and after all, I am what I am.

† Jackson, A. (1994). Translator's introduction. In A. Boal, The Rainbow of Desire: The Boal Method of Theatre and Therapy (A. Jackson, Trans.). New York: Routledge. (Original work published 1995).

Image Credit: Photo by Loren Grush, The Verge, 8 April 2020

 


01 August 2020