When I used to think about comparmentalization, I was against it. The most obvious way I saw it was how people would keep their professional and personal lives separate. For me, that separation spoke of denial. And of fear, of others thinking less of us if they knew of all the shameful unflattering things. The very things, I thought, that made us human.
And so the goal for me was to live an integrated life, to not compartmentalize. If one had inclinations (binge drinking, dancing topless, what have you) that colleagues couldn't find out, maybe the problem wasn't that those behaviors (and knowledge thereof) should be relegated to different spheres but that those "unprofessional" behaviors weren't healthy anyway and should be addressed. Or else the job (and colleagues therein) were simply not a fit to one's person.
Beyond professional/personal comparmentalization, there's also the kind that happens with different friends groups, and the different sets of behavior one can adopt with each. This is why I like introducing friends from different walks of my life to each other, as a challenge for me to integrate my being (if there's any divergence). But also because I believe in commonality - after all, they are all friends with me. But more importantly, if I can't find commonality with my different friends, how is anyone to find common ground with anyone else at all?
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Today though, I thought about the inevitable kind of comparmentalization that happens. In moving, changing jobs, relationship statuses, being close to people and then not, and then others. The pieces of yourself that you don't lose entirely, but are embedded in... elsewhere. That may be inaccessible for long and perhaps long-forgotten stretches. That are retrieved in bits or all at once when again in the company of that someone or in the embrace of that place. Where you realize that you are different, that you have been different, that perhaps you once acted differently, even slightly - laughed a little easier or felt a little awkward-er or simply were able to forget yourself. And those someones, those places, are the inevitable compartments where your past selves live.
Those compartments are not false, they're not fear but just what happens when you give and you take and you love and you move on - all of the changes in a life truly and openly lived.