Censioso Berretto

That means "ragged cap" in Italian.

The only reason that I know this is because, back in 1979 I created a journaling device -- I called one particular journal "The Journal of Mutarenome" (The Journal of Change Name). In this journal, I referred to everyone that I wrote about by a pseudonym, usually in Italian, based on some characteristic or trait they had -- "Censioso Berretto" was a friend who was famous for her collection of outrageous thrift-store hats.

I think I did this for a number of reasons.

I remember that it seemed vaguely romantic to me at the time. I don't speak Italian now, and didn't then, and have never studied it. I simply had at my disposal a fairly comprehensive English/Italian Italian/English dictionary. I was 23 years old.

I think I might have also written like this at the time because I lived in pretty tight quarters with three other people, most of whom I didn't really trust to keep their nose out of my journal, so I contrived this device -- figuring that by the time they could parse out who was who, they would have no time left to absorb the real information in my journal (unless they noticed the Italian dictionary next to the journal).

I think that I mostly did it because it allowed me to look at these individuals in my life as icons or representations of themselves based on these pronounced characteristics. Maybe this was my first stab at some form of representative reality.

But, in fact, the title of this entry -- "ragged cap" -- has nothing absolutely nothing to do with Italian, or journaling, or 1979.

I was going to call it "Role-ing Your Own" or "Changing Hats" or something like that -- then "Cencioso Berretto" resurfaced as memory -- so I used that.

The focus of this post is my current internal wrestling match concerning "Roles".

This is not high school wrestling, mind you.

This is not Gorgeous-George and the AWF fake-twirl-you-around-my-head-and-slam-you-on-the-mat wrestling.

This is not even real live Sumo men-in-diapers wrestling.

This is sweaty, naked, I'll-gouge-your-eyes-out wrestling -- no, not even that!

Ah, I know . . . . . .

This is Smeagol-Deagol-And-The-One-Ring Wrestling.

I just have this awful feeling that someone's going to get throttled in the end.
---------------------------------------
I wear hats.

A lot of hats.

I play roles.

A lot of roles.

Here are some of the roles I choose to play (not necessarily in order of intensity or frequency) :
Community member, teacher, psychic, channel, non-profit Board Member, business owner, Society Member, tenant, friend, informal counselor, formal counselor, webmistress, daughter, sister, aunt, neighbor, citizen, and buddy.

Some of these roles I play by direct agreement and authorization (Community Member, Friend, Teacher, Psychic, Formal Counselor, Board Member).

Other roles I have played according to what I consider to be slippery-slidey social "agreements" or unspecified traditions (Daughter, Informal Counselor, Neighbor, Citizen, Sister, Buddy).

I've been working with this roles thing for a while.

I've addressed some of my issues around it by getting very specific about what I mean when I use a slippery word like "friend".

These days, in my life, I don't consider everybody that I like/enjoy/feel affinity for a "friend". (I used to, by the way.)

To me, being a friend means something very specific -- and to me, being a true friend is important -- and so, now, when I enter friendship with someone, I make agreements about what this means between us.

I may still hang out with people that I like, enjoy, or feel affinity for, but I refer to them, usually, as "buddies".

I concocted my "required friendship agreements" by observing the friendships that I had experienced as really working for me.

I found that some of the necessary ingredients for me in sustaining friendship over a long period of time, and through many varied situations, were:

1. Truth and Honesty
2. Mutual Respect
3. Treating Each Other as We Would Like to Be Treated
   
4. Friendly Intent (for example, if my friend is late for a date, I'll assume first that they got held up somewhere, not that they are blowing me off)

I did this because I got tired of calling certain relationships "friendships". I got tired of thinking that my "friend" and I had the same definition, understanding, and expectations about what it meant to be friends -- when --

-- while I thought being a friend to someone meant that I would be honest with them -- even when it was uncomfortable for me, that I would speak up on their behalf when someone was bad-mouthing them to me, and that if they did something that bugged me, I would either say something directly to them about it rather than dissing them behind their back, or assume they meant no harm and let it go --

--the other person apparently thought that being a friend meant that they would hide the information that they had just gone house-hunting with my lover (even though my lover hadn't told me she had any intention of moving out), because they didn't want to "get in the middle of it" or "upset me" -- oh, and did I mention -- this "friend" was the person who was going to be renting my lover the new house?

I'm not saying this is "bad" or anything . . . .

I'm just saying that I think it unlikely that these disparate expectations/definitions about friendship will sustain a close and functional relationship over time.

And that's just ONE of the roles. The role of "friend".

The reason I'm grasping for the throat of this roles issue is that it's been a real pain in the ass for me lately.

I don't mind playing the role of teacher/advisor/counselor. I believe that this is one of the many things I came to Earth to do. Most of the time, I enjoy it.

However, I do mind:

1. shouting in the wilderness,
   
2. tossing pearls before swine,
   
3. and/or repeating myself ad nauseum.

I have the opportunity to interact with lots of people. Last year, just in classes and circles, I interacted with over 200 different individuals. Some of these people have dual, or even quadruple, relationships with me (some even more than that) -- they may be:

• friends and
clients, or

• buddies and
clients and students, or

• friends and
clients and students and Society members and housemates and . . . . . . .

Well, you get the picture.

I'm pretty facile with all of this. I've been doing it for a while.

For example: I don't usually find it difficult to hang my "personal friend" hat in the corner while I'm doing a session -- to approach the private reading with a sense of objectivity and larger perspective. Having Carruch come in at the beginning of the session helps a lot with this.

Sometimes, though, this hat-switching can get complicated and messy. Usually, I find this when I'm moving in the other direction -- from teacher/counselor to friend.

Most of my closest friends have either opted not to deal with me at all at a "professional" level (they don't sit in classes or seek me out for readings), or they seem to have a similar ability to suspend the friendship role while we are interacting as student/teacher or client/counselor.

I don't know if that's the right term, exactly: "suspend" -- it's not like we stop being friends or acting toward one another in a friendly way -- more like we each respect the primary role that we're playing in at the moment.

For example -- if I'm your friend, and I'm listening to you as a friend, you may or may not want to listen to or hear what I have to say about what you're saying. You might just need a listening ear, or a good laugh. When I'm working with someone as a teacher or counselor, I'm assuming that that person has sought me out for information that they don't have already -- that they have come to specifically to get that information -- that they want (in fact are paying) to hear what I have to say.

Here's where it gets thorny. I assume that anyone who knows me well enough to want to be my "friend" probably also knows:

1. That I'm pretty psychic.
2. That I'm pretty outspoken.

If we're jabbering away and I have a friendship agreement to be completely truthful and honest with you, it seems to me that including the psychic information I might be getting would be part of honoring that agreement. But . . . and . . . I'm assuming that we're sitting as friends -- not as client/counselor.

Conversely, I don't necessarily want to spend my "friend" time just doing an informal version of what I do most days professionally. To me, this is like inviting your garbage-collector friend over for coffee and asking him to take your trash when he goes.

Okay, maybe not exactly like that.

But do you see where I'm heading with this?

I'm tinkering with the idea of throwing out these roles altogether.

At one level, that seems the most aligned choice in terms of becoming an integrated and assimilated "Whole Self".

At another level, I will confess that I have some fears about maintaining equal exchange, and having real friendships that are reciprocal and peer-based, if I abandon the roles altogether.

I worry that people will want to be my "friend" just so that they can get informal session-work. This used to happen a lot before I really picked up my work in a "serious" way (damn, I hate that phrase -- let me try again) -- before I started working professionally (nope, that's not it either) -- how about "before I embraced my role as a counselor/teacher"?

See, there it is -- that role thing.

In some ways, a role is helpful -- it assists me in understanding the responsibilities that I am taking on in a given situation. When I walk into class as a "teacher", I expect some things from myself that I don't necessarily expect of myself when I attend a class as a student (which is probably kind of fucked-up, now that I think of it).

Yet in other ways, the roles seem a hindrance to my fluidity as a being.

Plus, all that hat-swapping can get confusing, and if the person I'm dealing with doesn't "get" it, I've found that we can end up with that mis-match of expectations and intentions that I experienced before I started defining "friendship" more clearly.

There are other pitfalls to these roles, in my experience. In our culture, I think that the word "teacher" (especially "spiritual teacher") too often equals "target". I have heard, from many clients who, to me, are natural teachers and guides, the involuntary, horrified gasp as Carruch answers their question: "What am I here for?", with the calm response "You are here to teach others".

Even in those without experience as a teacher, there seems to be an autonomic understanding of the weighty responsibility inherent in the role -- and the knowledge that standing up to say "I know something and here is what I know" may be a predictable prelude to rotten eggs and/or angry peasants preparing a stake and some nice, dry kindling.

When I worked as a social worker, I was strongly encouraged to "keep my roles separate". Most therapists, counselors, and other helping professionals receive direct training in this "skill", and for some, mixing roles in any way is considered professional anathema.

I don't think that's "bad" -- really -- I don't.

I think that there are deep issues of ethics and responsibility involved when taking on the mantle of authority -- authority of any kind. I know of a woman who married one of her counseling clients, and the drama that I watched unfold between them was truly sad, in my opinion. Having begun their relationship from a basis of unequal power, the only way for her husband to rise to a sense of equality with her was to reject her, and the "authority" she had once had over him as his "healer/counselor/therapist".

I have also known therapists/healers/professionals who take this separation of roles so seriously that they effectively quarantined themselves from life. I suspect that, for at least a few of these, this served as a socially-sanctioned excuse for a type of withdrawal from other humans that suited their natural proclivities anyway.

Okay -- now -- whoa -- hold on! I just used the phrases "deep issues of ethics and responsibility", "mantle of authority", "socially-sanctioned excuse", and "natural proclivities" within two paragraphs. (Did anyone else notice that?)

This probably means that I am getting way, way too wrapped up here.

But . . . and . . . these are the kinds of things I think about. My responsibility as a teacher. My responsibility as a counselor. My responsibility as a community member -- a daughter -- a friend.

I look at these roles and I look at myself. Sometimes, I wonder if the garb of these roles obscures me too much -- if they actually prevent others from really seeing me as the human being that I am.

Then I think of those people that I journaled about in 1979 -- the people that I reduced to iconic status in my mind and my writing by re-naming them. Most of them were older than I, and/or I perceived them as more powerful or self-possessed than myself.

Were they as I saw them? Were the roles they took for themselves the same roles that I projected upon them? Am I projecting these roles for myself? Are they projected onto me?

I honestly do not know, and I still don't speak Italian.

(Post originally started January 9th, 2006)