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What’s your reaction when you hear about the pious-sounding cleric who molests children? The pillar of the community whose hobby is shoplifting? The idealistic-sounding politician who, when finished with the last fiery speech of the day, limos home to an enclave with a carbon footprint bigger than BigFoot's?
Yet a double life can be a good thing, one pursued by too few people. For example, many people feel forced into a more constrained existence than they’d like to live. They want a “respectable” job: executive, teacher, librarian, cleric, etc. Yet inside, that executive wants to play guitar in a rock band, the teacher to be a salsa dancer, the librarian to be a megaphone-wielding activist, the cleric to paint nudes.
And what if the double life is even edgier: Be a mild-mannered twerp by day, James Bond spy by night. Or, when you really think about it, except that it’s illegal, is there anything wrong about a preppy college student by day who, to make more than the crappy work-study job would pay, by night is a sex worker?
So now we turn to you. Does an alter ego lurk within? For example, be a psychologist by day, belly dancer by night? Hard-driving lawyer by day, meditating, yoga-posing Buddhist by night? School bus driver during the week and on weekends, a hot-air balloon pilot?
Or do you want your double-life to be serial; that is, you’ve lived one kind of existence for a long time and now would like to enter a radically different phase? For example, you’ve been a cop and now would like to become a social worker--or vice versa. Or you’ve been your typical materialistic American and now want to give most of your worldly goods to the poor and live simply. Or you’ve been a wild woman and now would like a period of calm, for example, a job as a bank lending officer with an after-work hobby of cooking?
To help trigger your ideas on what sort of double life you might like to live, answer these questions:
1. What would be the opposite of how you’re living now? For example, if you’re living a spartan lifestyle, it would be a sybaritic one. If so, you might, for example, decide to become a nanny to someone rich, or do what it takes to become rich yourself.
2. Whose existence do you most admire? For example, if you admire Barack Obama, you might decide to make your alter ego, your second life, to be a community activist.
3. What’s the coolest activity you can think of? For example, if it’s a fashion runway model, look out for local fundraising fashion shows—they’re around-- and volunteer to be a model.
4. What kind of performance could you do? A three-minute comedy routine at open mic night might launch an alter ego life as a comedian.
5. What kind of non-performing creative work could you do? Create enough paintings to have your own art show? Become a fiction writer, even if the only people to read your work are the members of your writer’s group who read your short stories?That still might constitute a second life.
6. What activity would most support your favorite cause? For example, if you’re pro-choice, could your alter ego be to organize counter-protests every time an anti-abortion group pickets an abortion clinic?
Marty Nemko's bio is in Wikipedia.
