I'm Only Alive When I'm Here

Reflections on Going Home

The premise of Apple TV+’s series Severance is this: corporate office workers undergo brain surgery which ‘severs’ their memories and experiences. The result is that a worker’s body plays host to two personas. The first persona is the worker’s outside self, the self that remains largely untouched post-surgery and witnesses nothing but off-hours. The second persona is brand new and witnesses nothing but life in the office. From the moment the worker steps into the office, this new alter ego is activated and made to endure the nine-to-five shift — all while knowing that somebody else, the same somebody who chose to get the surgery, lives nothing but nights and weekends. 

The compelling internal conflict that the characters on Severance face is not unique to the corporate world or even to science fiction. I noticed a through-line to my own life when I examined the experience of visiting my hometown. I felt internally divided — there appeared to be no continuity between my university-self and my home-self. I got on the plane as one person in Edinburgh and got off of the plane at Boston Logan International as somebody else entirely.  

I don’t think I’d notice this separation so much if I weren’t plagued by a bias against my hometown. I’ve written before that I was a hermit all the way through high school. It’s time to admit that I was also a bitter one: I lacked interest in the things that were going on at home, and, from an early age, I willfully stopped trying to participate. I didn’t want to join clubs, I didn’t want to do sports, and, most days, I didn’t care to go anywhere after school; I didn’t feel like having community if it wasn’t on my terms. In short, I divested from life in Boston. When I got to St Andrews, however, I invested like a coked-up Wall Street banker during a market tailspin; I recognised that the old Sam had to go  —  progress was going to be made. 

Despite the small-town stagnation, St Andrews is full of potential if you’re looking to evolve your persona. You see the same people just enough to learn how to build relationships without suffering from overexposure. Everything is within walking distance, so you suddenly feel more capable — no longer made juvenile by lack of a driving licence. You can toe the line between adulthood and childhood, real life and campus life, risk and restraint. To me, life in St Andrews became rich and vivid. I was alive. At university, I could go anywhere in town within fifteen minutes. I could take myself shopping, choose to sit at a park and read, or go out at night under the safety of a place dominated by other students. At university, I was making an addictive level of progress. I was making my dreams of escaping my restrictive old self real. 

Then, last summer rolled around, and it was time to go home. Four months grumbled ahead of me like a thunderstorm. I remember thinking about all the risks I’d have to take being in Boston for that long: how many car rides, how many walks, how many dodgy seafood plates. How many instances where I might get in some awful accident and die before I was allowed to make progress again. That irrational fear sprang from a very rational understanding of the situation I was in: my two selves were entirely bound to the places and circumstances in which they were formed. I really didn’t have the ability to choose who to be; it was a matter of position. Whether or not I really could have chosen to be different in Boston was beside the point. The overwhelming influence of my surroundings seemed to always ensure that I began operating on my hermit settings. In St Andrews, I had started a life  — now I was removed from all the tools and resources that might’ve helped me to keep working on it. I was, once again, bitter: I felt I had waited nineteen years to actually jumpstart my life, and the reality of how long I had waited only became clear to me when it was time to go home and wait again. 

In Severance, one of the characters communicates a harsh message to her office-worker alter ego: “I am a person. You are not. I make the decisions. You do not.” She is the dominant persona  — the one who matters, the one who gets to live. I believe this exemplifies the tension between home life and university life. By choosing to leave home, you’re choosing to follow a certain path. A path is linear; you can’t be at the beginning and at the end at the same time. Even if you loved your hometown, it’s difficult to ignore the fact that it was your choice to go somewhere else, to give your life to another community. As you walk that new path, you become more comfortable on the road than in the place where you started. Progress is always understood to be more valuable than staying the same. 

But this way of seeing things also isn’t necessarily healthy. It’s an unimpeachable fact that I am the same person wherever I am. The ‘severed’ nature of the two identities is more of a byproduct of my value judgment than of any real irreconcilability between them. Last summer, I realised that the real challenge wasn’t missing my university-self, but uniting my two selves so that I could discover whoever was waiting in between the two extremes. I had assumed that my home-self was useless to me, someone to work at dismantling. I refused to recognise that my home-self wasn’t defined by my worst aspects but, in fact, by my best aspects. Everything my parents taught me, the kindness I learned through living peacefully, the time I gave myself to read and learn represented the only things that made the creation of a university persona possible. Who would I be if I ripped out those foundations? Not someone who’d choose to go shopping, or who’d sit in the park and read, or who’d go out at night. I’d be someone unrecognisable, someone worse. 

Over this most recent reading week, I went home. It was still difficult to resist backsliding into my old self, but I tried thinking differently. I invested a new importance in all of the things I felt I’d left behind. I looked through my books, the things I drew on the walls, the things I left stuffed into boxes, and, finally, the brochure from St Andrews I brought home during my senior year of high school. 

In Severance, the process of recombining your two split personas is called dfsz. When I found that brochure, I abruptly reintegrated. The persona between the two extremes emerged, and I felt grateful for my old self. Ultimately, how could I resent him? Looking at that brochure  — the thing I once flipped through while I dreamt of progress  — I suddenly understood that I’ve never been anybody else. 

Illustration by Isabelle Holloway