I’ve spent most of my life as a bridge. Between races, between classes, between people who look at the same situation and see completely different things. Work turned out the same way. I landed in the gap between business and technology, translating for two groups who swear they don’t speak the same language.
I love it, mostly. There’s a real thrill in seeing why each side is right from where it stands, and then watching the argument soften once they finally hear each other.
But there’s something about bridges I only noticed recently: nobody lives on one. You cross a bridge to get somewhere else.
I was at a charity event for underprivileged high school students, there as an Amazon representative, when a woman asked if I had been one of the students. I was well over thirty-five. I’d, fortunately, never been underprivileged. I still don’t know what she saw. My age? My appearance? Something else? I’d arrived as the corporate representative, but somehow she’d mistaken me for someone the program was designed to serve.
That’s the gnome. I’ve moved between different worlds, and I don’t always feel fully at home in any of them. I can hold two sides of an argument without signing up for either. That’s freeing. It’s also lonely.
I’ve wondered if belonging means picking a side, planting a flag and calling it home. But every time I imagine it, it feels like trading away the very thing the middle gave me. Maybe some of us are most ourselves in between.
I’m not ready to stop being a bridge. I’d just like a little cottage on it. With a garden. Somewhere people can drive by, wave, and think “that’s my gnomey.”
Too much?