Don’t underestimate the value of playing a role. It means you’ve found a way to become integrated into something bigger than yourself. It may not engage the totality of who you are, but what can? The better the role, the more it will be able to do this, in time. But there is a special kind of value to be found in learning to play that role and fulfill that purpose within a larger interconnected context, in submitting yourself to something bigger than yourself.

One way that roles go wrong is due to people trying to wield the power of a role without being willing to accept its limitations and downsides. When you try to cheat the role, when you refuse to pay the price, when you refuse to accept its limitations and instead seek to find a way around them or avoid accepting the support and checks and counterbalances that role requires, that’s when roles go wrong. That’s when they can become abusive and distorting, either to us or to those we affect through them.

Roles are something we are forever pushing back on and reinterpreting through the lens of our own uniqueness and limitations and requirements, and they in turn are constantly pushing back on us with their uniqueness and limitations and requirements.