Here I am in this uniformish, pant-suit sort of thing

Sometimes at work I wonder about this thing of image and what we present to the world of our professional selves. Being professional, the whole notion of professionalism as I see it promoted and acted out in the world of office work (assuming for a minute that all ‘office work’ has this notion of professionalism running through it like a thread, and that this is in common regardless of the content or exact nature of the work / budget / culture of all these workplaces), is about restraint, consistency and of selective showing of self. Many parts of our lives and inner lives are not ok for expression in offices, or while we do the work we do in offices. There is a particular sanitized, pastel, predictable pantomime about it all. A clean and nice fiction that we co-create.

Asexual, abiotic, we in meetings are not people who shit and burp and crave and cry and have wild dreams in the night. We are not the same people who were born through blood and pale clotted lard cream, purple, wailing, wondrous into the world by some kind of magical Russian dolly conjuring, part of eternity. No. We are groomed and smiling and polite and rational. We are timed, and measured and wrapped in neat wool and polycotton, buttoned up. We stay here, 7, 8, 9, 10 hours through the most of our days and don’t disappear without explanation. Or scream and groan. Or bite each other or pat each other or cradle sadness in our arms. We stay here, being busy, saying very little of what we might think about where else we might rather be or who else with. We say very little about extreme feelings of joy or fear or uncertainty. We rarely speak honestly, if honest means telling the all of what we are. Expect in those rare moments where all this rest disappears and we are consumed with the excitement of thinking, are preoccupied with the doing of tasks, in those rare moments we are honest in our expression – honestly being rational, committed, neat professionals. Is this what we aspire to? Do we act out so tidy because we wish we were? As if all this professionalism is in training for the day when we might wake up and be happy to be these people living the lives our heads have made up for us.

And why have I been wondering this in particular this week? Today I looked at the images I have stuck to my pinboard at work and thought maybe they were too diverse, too messy, too personal. Scribbled drawings by children and monster drawings by me, and art postcards and landscapes, and close ups of animals and hand printed postcard from Vietnam – it looked somehow too messy, too eclectic. I was wondering whether I should trim down my expression at work, to those things on topic. Tidy, streamlined, professional. You see my problem is I know what it looks like, this thing of being a sensible professional tidy grown up, I can see where and how I’m not it. That gap isn’t yet something I’ve entirely accepted, nor do I mind enough to try and close it.