At first, it feels like sci-fi. Severance: people get surgery, and everything before the office door vanishes into a black hole of memory. The work self knows nothing about the home self. The home self knows nothing about work. Two strangers in one body, with different shift schedules.

Then suddenly, you recognize it. This is already happening without any surgery. I’ve noticed: my voice changes when I answer a work call from the kitchen; my thoughts shift like someone flipped the track. Office jokes don’t survive outside the open space. Home grudges fade in the elevator’s hum.

No surgery—just context, and you become someone else.

I thought it was adaptation. A soft fit to the environment: here you talk like this and dress differently—but inside, I’m the same? But that “same” turns out surprisingly ghostly. There are habits and patterns that only kick in under the office AC’s smell or the sound of a calendar alert. Sometimes I catch myself with a tone that feels foreign—as if someone else briefly moved in wearing my face.

Where does healthy role separation end, and real loss of continuity begin? When I “switch off” under stress and act on autopilot—is that protection or the first step toward that inner severance? There was a moment during a deadline: late at night, at my laptop, I suddenly noticed a gap between who I was during the day (organized, quick) and this sleepy me in front of the screen. Like a dividing line ran right through the middle of my skull.

There’s also a strange feeling coming home after a tough day: work memories seem to evaporate behind the apartment door, leaving only vague echoes of tiredness. If I forgot everything about my office self, would I suffer less? Or would I become less myself?

In Severance, this problem is pushed to the limit: the “work self” knows nothing about life outside the office walls, its misery locked inside a routine with no hope of rescue… but can suffering exist without a point of comparison? Can happiness exist in a creature with a one-day memory?

Corporate culture can do a soft severance without a scalpel—through dress codes, team chat language, coffee break rituals. You enter the zone of rules—it’s like you’re rewritten with a new set of functions: allowed words, acceptable feelings, wanted reactions. The camera sees what you do; an invisible scriptwriter decides exactly who you are until the “off” signal.

But it’s not just corporations; this split is built into the human mind as a way to survive conflicting roles. We’re our own editors: cutting out useless memories here, boosting needed traits there… Sometimes we edit our daily story so well, the thread that ties it all together almost disappears.

If language sets the limits of thought (and outside language there’s no thought or memory), then how much do we lose every day just because we forgot to find the right word for ourselves? Does a whole “I” even exist? Or is it a myth for those lucky ones who never had to bury part of themselves to keep another?

Turns out, control over identity through forgetting is closer to the body than it first seemed—it just works in slow everyday mode instead of the show’s surgical cut.

If half of me will never meet the other half (split by work hours or a language barrier inside my head), can I call both parts myself?

I don’t know for sure… But now at least I understand what I’m really afraid to forget forever.