More to Give

 

It’s a tough life to live.

As an undercover agent, you are purposefully choosing a life of isolation, danger, and possibly even death.

Your ties to anyone and everyone you have ever known or loved are cut, temporarily severed for who knows how much time.

Until the assignment is done.

Or until you reach another level of ‘under’.

Which makes it sound a little like a computer game, where you have to be successful at one particular level and avoid all the traps and people who want to kill you, unless you kill them first.

If you succeed in getting to the end of level one without being killed, captured, tortured or turned, chances are you have made it to level two.

Where it becomes more dangerous, more complicated, with a greater chance for success or failure, and further to fall.

Except you are not rising up through the levels to the point where you can see all the levels below you, quite the opposite.

You are sinking deeper and deeper into the world that is pulling you under, further and further into the darkest recesses of the cover you’ve created for yourself.

And you have to do it alone.

There is no room for mistakes, no-one to back you up if it all goes wrong, no-one to stop the man holding the gun to your head from pulling the trigger.

No second chances.

Makes you wonder why they do it.

It’s important work, for starters.  They uncover the biggest, baddest secrets that anyone has to hide, and expose them for who they really are.

Still, a decent accountant can do the same thing, and all from the safety of his desk.

But they can go places that accountants can’t go, where information is passed by word of mouth, not written down in nice shiny ledgers.

Fair point.

There are police officers who work undercover on a daily basis, being a different person from one day to the next, being exactly what is needed in each situation.

They never know who they are going to be, and are constantly having to remember a new identity, a different persona.

And they get to shrug off that persona at the end of the day, and go home.

To their wives and their families, to their loved ones.

But what of the others?

The ones who choose to stay in that persona for months, sometimes years, never able to shake it off, never able to set their feet back on the ground in their own world.

Or when they finally do, to discover that their own world is no longer there.

It has moved on and become something else without them.

And so have the people in it.

They are barely recognisable to the one who left, as he is to them.

It isn’t surprising he leaps at the next assignment when it comes along, more comfortable in the world of the unknown, than in a world that he once knew.

A sporadic, nomadic lifestyle that seems to have little to recommend it.

And so the question looms again, why do it?

The answer, I believe, lies in who they are.

It is a profession they feel drawn to purely because of who they already are, who may have wandered in and out of other, similar jobs for years, taking a crumb of what they feel was worthwhile about each one.

Until they find the undercover life, or it finds them.

And when it comes time to become that other person, they find it is not all that hard.

Easier yet is letting other people go, shutting them out and cutting them off, so that the stone-cold persona can be free.

Deep down, they always felt like they weren’t like everyone else, like there were aspects to their personalities that were ‘different’ or ‘wrong’.

They were so used to playing different roles with different people that it became second nature to them, and were never truly fixed on who they pretended to be.

Ever the outsiders in a group and self-reliant to a fault, all the parts of themselves that seem anti-social to the rest of society will keep them functioning and alive in the world of undercover.

They may even revel in it.

As an escape from the realities of living within the boundaries of a society that makes slaves of the best of us, they are able to exist beyond these walls.

Living outside of society, outside of the rules, a freedom all of its own.

I think I’m beginning to see the appeal.

It just depends on how much you are willing to sacrifice in order to truly embrace that other world, to let go of all the worldly possessions you are ever likely to own.

Everything you ever held dear.

Including people.

It’s the way of sacrifice that holds them apart from others, the willingness not only to give up everything they have, but everything they are ever likely to have.

And if they don’t feel like it’s a sacrifice, then its simply not enough.

There’s always more to give.