f0rrest | the other side of the shoji screen (Reply)

“I am not who I appear to be,” was what I told a co-worker on a Zoom call a few days ago. “I am so much more than this.”

Every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, my daytime routine is basically the same. My alarm goes off at 8 AM, I snooze it, it goes off again, I snooze it again, and so on, eventually waking up around 9:30 AM or so, at which point I brush my teeth, take some vitamins, say good morning to my family, hugs and kisses and whatnot, then I leave the house through the sliding glass door, walk down a cement path in my backyard, and enter my own little world, my office, which is a 10x12 tiny home. The inside of my office is segmented off with a shoji, one of those Japanese paper screens with panels, mine is tan-colored and made of paper emblazoned with the budding branches of a cherry blossom tree, framed in fake black wood, purchased from eBay years ago. This shoji functions as a divider, cutting my world into halves, the vocational-nightmare half and the truly-myself half.

In the vocational-nightmare half, there’s a company-issued ThinkPad hooked up to two big monitors, with a wireless keyboard and mouse on the desk. The desk is actually a cheap black plastic folding table I bought from Walmart years ago, upon which sit all sorts of little knickknacks, like a cat bobblehead, a model shishi-odoshi fountain with the bamboo and the rocks, some Nintendo-themed coasters, a glass TARDIS mug I got for Christmas one year that serves as a holder for my pens, and a paper unicorn my son made at the library one day. If you’re sitting facing the desk, there’s a black headset hanging within arm’s reach from the left wall, and the chair is an ergonomic black office chair I got on clearance a couple years back. Above all that, hanging on the wall, is a corkboard from the late 2000s with all sorts of stuff tacked to it, some of that stuff tracing back to my teenage years, like Pokemon cards and cutouts from The Cure’s Galore booklet and some printed anime stuff, all buried underneath pictures of my kids and various work things that just keep building up. Perhaps the corkboard is some sort of symbol, a symbol for the passing of time, or for how adulthood can quickly yet subtly smother adolescence, or perhaps it’s some sort of symbol of hope, for how, despite all this adult shit piling up, my adolescence is still there, shining through the cracks.

They say everything’s a metaphor or, like, a simile of some kind, or something.

From about 9:30 AM to 5 PM, I do work stuff behind this shoji screen. In this corner of the room, I am somebody else. I literally go by a different name, my legal first name (“Forrest” is my middle name), and I work for a software company that I do not give even two shits about. We sell software for call centers. I’m not in sales, per se, but I am dangerously close to sales. I spend most of my day on Zoom calls, talking to employees whom I manage, and sometimes to our clients, vice presidents and C-suite executives, trying to keep them happy. The company says our team exists to make sure clients are adopting our software and getting the full value out of it, but we mostly just handle fire drills all day, every day, because the software, frankly, sucks ass. It’s not a scam or anything like that, it does what it’s supposed to do, but there are so many little nuances and bespoke quirks from client to client that, ultimately, something always goes wrong, and there are so many bureaucratic layers to selling and buying enterprise software that, often, the buyers don’t even know what the hell they’re truly buying, which leads to all sorts of billing disputes, all of which my team manages. And, like every corporate tech company these days, we have added AI stuff into the software being sold. On a basic level, this AI stuff is designed to automate workflows that were once handled by humans, which means that, if it’s working properly, a client can offload large amounts of work to a single non-human worker that they pay around $100,000 a year for, which means that, when you get right down to it, I work for a company that packages and sells joblessness. We are destroyers of livelihood.

They say society will adapt, that it’s no different than the industrial revolution, that’s what they say.

On the other side of the shoji screen is where all the stuff I actually care about is located. There’s a low-to-the-floor bookcase with about fifty books slotted into it, and a glass desk upon which stand two flat-panel monitors for my PC, and a CRT from the early 2000s that I use to play old games on, one of those prison TVs made from clear plastic so inmates couldn’t hide drugs in it or whatever, it even has a cell number and block number scratched into the side, so you know it’s the genuine article. Opposite the glass desk is another desk, a wooden one, where my Xbox 360 and Switch 2 consoles sit near a large 1080p flat-screen propped up on a tall stand. The TV is surrounded by DVD cases and games for both the 360 and Switch. Behind all that is a large blue blanket tacked to the wall, depicting an astrological wheel with all sorts of esoteric symbols woven into it. There are little plastic figurines all around, characters from video games, mostly. The lights are always kept to a dim orange glow, because I like it that way. There’s a second office chair in this area, one that I can swivel back and forth from the glass desk to the wooden desk without having to scoot around much. I got this chair from the side of the road, someone was throwing it away, so the arms are all beat up with foam coming out, but it’s a La-Z-Boy or whatever they’re called, so it’s quite comfortable, despite looking ratty as hell. By the wooden desk, there’s another corkboard on the wall, tacked with Polaroids that capture fond memories. Nearby, there’s a tall, narrow cabinet with about thirty Nintendo DS games slotted into it. Opposite that, there’s another cabinet full of strategy guides from ancient times and PS1 games I’ve had since I was a kid. There’s even an old-timey boombox atop the bookcase, it sits on a vintage cassette case filled to the max with tapes ranging from Sting to OutKast to Unwound. The boombox also picks up AM/FM bands, so sometimes I’ll listen to NPR or classical music while writing or browsing the internet or playing video games. As of writing this, I’ve been on a Zelda kick, so I’ve been playing the Master Quest version of Ocarina of Time on my CRT, trying to beat the game with only three hearts. While I’m playing, I take notes on my MacBook, notes I’ll use for a future essay. This half of the room is where I do all my thinking and playing, where I feel totally and utterly myself, sometimes entering a kind of flow state where nothing else seems to matter. And sometimes, when the mood strikes me, I even dance and sing in here. This place is my sanctuary. After my son goes to bed around 9 PM, I spend most every night here, writing or reading or listening to music or playing video games, which is the same shit I’ve been doing every night since I was like ten years old.

They say people never change, that their essence is locked-in forever. I don’t know if that’s true, but that’s what they say.

What has changed, however, is that back then, when I was ten or fourteen or seventeen or whatever, my world was not separated by a shoji screen, but now it is. Back then, my room was a sanctuary without taint. The same cannot be said for my current sanctuary. I have started to view this shoji screen as a symbol, a symbol representing not only the physical divide between the two worlds I inhabit, but also the spiritual divide between me and some other version of me that, frankly, I don’t like very much. The cherry blossoms face outward, to the world I love, and the tan backside faces the vocational nightmare. I like to think that, in front of the cherry blossoms, I am my true self, the writer, the real me, the person who has values and standards, the person who bemoans capitalistic greed and incorporates Zen practices into his daily life and writes like his life depends on it. But behind the screen, “I am not who I appear to be.” I am an imposter. A shadow. I throw away my morals, my values, and I become someone else, someone who, through a series of accidents, has landed in the corporate tech world, just doing what needs to be done to survive, to put bread on the table, so to speak. Behind the shoji screen, I am participating in the grind, not because I want to, but because I feel like I have to. This other version of me has all sorts of justifications, like, “I may be supporting software that gets people fired, but it’s OK, people always bounce back.” I have built all sorts of mental bulwarks to defend myself from the existential dissonance of being, perhaps, two different people. I tell myself, behind the screen, I am not who I appear to be. I tell myself that fate has had a hand in this, that due to how things have played out, my dumb youthful choices, the apathetic outlook I had on life for such a long time, that here I am now, in the tech world, because I have to be, to pay the bills, to support my family.

But these bulwarks, these justifications, are starting to crumble. I know, deep down, that I have some kind of choice here. I could quit my job, for example, perhaps find another that isn’t so morally questionable. This is certainly something I could do. But then I tell myself, well, that would make my life, and perhaps my family’s lives, harder. We would have to tough it out for a little bit. We would have to cut back, buy off-brand shit, stop throwing money at new electronics and fancy toys. And there’s certainly the possibility that I wouldn’t find another job, or maybe I’d find another job but the pay would be shit, so I wouldn’t be able to pay my mortgage, so maybe we’d have to move to some shitty apartment or something. None of this seems very appealing. But I ask myself, are these valid reasons, or are they just poor justifications, excuses? The fact of the matter is, right now, I’m straddling two worlds, living two different lives.

So who am I, really? Am I not spending over 8 hours a day doing this whole capitalistic routine? Is this not more time than I spend actually doing the stuff I enjoy? I want to believe in the cherry blossoms. I want to believe that’s the real version of me, the one that counts. But they say actions speak louder than words, and so many of my actions are work-oriented, so who am I, really? Am I the capitalist crony behind the shoji screen, or am I the idealistic writer on the other side?

I don’t know how to reconcile this.

How do you reconcile it?

The other day, on a Zoom call, I told a co-worker, “I am not who I appear to be. I am so much more than this.” And he just nodded his head and said, “Yeah, I get it,” then he adjusted himself in the camera so that his T-shirt was showing in full. It was a concert T-shirt, depicting Sting on stage with some date over his head. My co-worker gripped the fabric and pulled it to straighten the image out and said, “I don’t really care about all this work stuff. I mean, I do the job, and I try to do it well, but I’m basically only doing this to fund my lifestyle. My wife and I are big fans of Sting. We’ve been to over thirty of his concerts. I mean, I bet half of my paycheck goes to Sting stuff.” So we ended up talking about Sting for about thirty minutes. I showed him the Sting cassette I have, Ten Summoner’s Tales, and talked about how, as a kid, my mom loved Sting, and how her love of Sting rubbed off on me, and so now I listen to Sting all the time, because his music is nostalgic for me, transports me to another time and place. I told him my favorite Sting song is “If I Ever Lose My Faith In You,” and how the synthy swells and harmonica flourishes at the beginning of the song feel like stepping into another time and place. We talked about what we thought was his best era, which albums we enjoyed most, and how Sting is supposedly a huge asshole, but how that’s OK because his music is just so damn good. At the end of the call, the guy said, “Hey, this was a cool conversation. I feel like we’re closer now, like, I trust you a whole lot more. You seem like a real person.” And that’s when I realized that I am not unique. This guy is also behind a shoji screen. He has his own loves, his own interests, his own life outside of work. He does not want to be here, in front of this camera, fiddling with PowerPoints and playing with Excel sheets, but here he is, doing it, because of the series of accidents that made up his life to this point.

Later that day, I went to the gas station to grab a pack of cigarettes (don’t even start), and the woman behind the counter was trying to get me to sign up for their rewards program, and she was being low-key kind of aggressive about it, which was starting to get on my nerves. I asked myself, who the hell would want to spend their time forcing people into signing up for a rewards program? But then I thought back to the Sting guy, about how he’s just funding his Sting habit. And then I thought about myself, and my shoji screen. That’s when I realized that, wait, actually, no one would want to spend their time forcing people to sign up for a rewards program. This woman is only doing it because of the series of accidents that led to this point in her life. The world has conspired against her, in a way, forced her into a job she wants nothing to do with, yet she does it anyway, simply because she has to, to stay alive. In that gas station, I suddenly remembered this one study I had read months ago, which claimed that over 70% of people in America experience some form of “imposter syndrome,” and this suddenly made sense to me: everyone feels like an imposter because they are, in fact, imposters. The world has forced them into impostor syndrome. The system makes imposters out of us all. This woman has found herself working at a gas station with some sort of “rewards program” quota she has to hit, and she has to hit this quota to keep her job, to pay the rent, to support her family, or whatever. She doesn’t want to do it, but she does it anyway, because she has to. She’s an imposter, and that’s OK, because I’m an imposter, too. We’re all imposters. In that gas station, a sort of universal empathy bubbled up within me, and so, when she was going through her whole spiel, instead of narrowing my eyes and getting all short with her like I would normally do, I said, “Hey, you know what, sign me up.” I gave her my name, my phone number, my email address, then she handed me the cheap plastic card and said, “Thank you so much. Have a nice day, sir.” And she had a huge smile on her face.

As I left that gas station, I remember thinking to myself: I wonder what she’s like, on the other side of the shoji screen?