Living Divided No More

The phrase came to Palmer from the civil rights movement, where it described the moment a person decided that the gap between her private convictions and her public compliance had become intolerable. Rosa Parks did not refuse to give up her seat because she was angry; she refused because she had arrived, through decades of preparation and community, at a place of inner clarity about who she was and what she would not do. Living divided no more is not primarily a political act, though it can produce one. It is an ontological act: the refusal to maintain the energy-consuming division between the person one is inwardly and the persona one performs outwardly. Palmer developed the concept most fully in his work on [YOU] on AI's analogue concern—the divided life—arguing that the maintenance of the division is itself a form of harm: it depletes the cognitive and emotional resources that the person would otherwise bring to