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identity
explorer
Pick up the trail
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There is a cause, and it needs people. You:
Are in. You have been waiting your whole life for something like it.
Want to know what it pays and whether anybody is shooting.
Are already running it, and have been for two years.
Want to know who is in charge and whether they can protect you.
What keeps you awake:
Somebody you were responsible for, and failed.
Whether you were right to leave, and who is still in there.
A job you took that you should have turned down.
Everything, more or less. All of it. All the time.
Where you come from:
Somewhere small and far from anything, that you had to leave.
A household with a name, expectations and a public role.
An institution that raised you and taught you what to be.
Nowhere you discuss, and you would rather people stopped asking.
How do you handle fear?
Make a joke, and then do the thing anyway.
Get in front of it, angrily, so it cannot get in front of you.
Run, honestly. And then turn round, which is the hard part.
Narrate it, at length, to everybody in the vicinity.
What do you want that you would not say out loud?
To turn out to be somebody. Actually somebody.
To never lose anybody again, whatever that costs.
To hand it to somebody better and be allowed to stop.
To be useful enough that nobody leaves you behind.
Pick your approach to a plan:
There is no plan. There is you, and you will improvise.
There is a plan. You wrote it. You wrote the second one too.
You will follow it, and say so if it is wrong.
You do the job as briefed. The brief is what you agreed to.
What people underestimate about you:
How much of it is stubbornness rather than talent.
That you turn up. Late, complaining, but you turn up.
How much you are still carrying from before they met you.
That you chose this. Nobody made you.
Somebody has to be told a hard truth. You:
Tell them, in one sentence, and stay in the room afterwards.
Tell them at the worst moment, because it is finally true.
Say nothing. It was not the job you were hired for.
Worry about it for a week, then blurt it out badly.
What would make you change your whole life?
A message. Any sign at all that something else exists.
Losing the person you had organised the whole of it around.
Seeing, once, exactly what you had been part of.
A child. Somebody small, who is now yours to keep alive.
Your relationship with the people who need you:
You say you are leaving. You have said so for years.
They come first, and you have never seriously questioned that.
You keep a distance. Last time you got close it went badly.
You attach immediately and completely, and then fret.
Someone finally says the true thing. You want it to be:
"You were the one who believed it could be different."
"You came back. Nobody thought you would."
"Everything held because you were holding it."
"There is still something of you left in there."
The end of your story:
You hand it over to somebody younger, and step back.
You go back for the ones still where you used to be.
One last job, and then somewhere quiet. Genuinely, this time.
You are still there, in the background, having survived all of it.
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Your explorer
Changes show on the trail as you make them.
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Design
Wren
Nova
Liana
Flux
Skin
Coat
Pack colour
Hat
Pack
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