It was no creation of mine, that simile. I knew it right away. It had to have been something I heard or read somewhere.
It's from "The Office," it turns out. A quick Google search found it directly. I had to laugh. It's from an episode from the middle of season 3 that I watched no more than a few weeks ago. In it, Jan, the driven but icy New York executive (played by Melora Hardin), speaks to the camera about her decision to follow her therapist's suggestion that she surrender to her impulsive and perhaps self-destructive attraction to Michael (Steve Carell), the emotionally stunted, cheerfully pathetic boss of Dunder-Mifflin's Scranton branch. She says about that choice:
I am taking a calculated risk. What's the upside? I overcome my nausea, fall deeply in love, babies, normalcy, no more self-loathing. Downside... I date Michael Scott publicly and collapse in on myself like a dying star. Why is this so hard? That's what she said. Oh my god, what am I saying?
Do you find that line as interesting as I do? When I watched it a few weeks ago, I immediately rewound to listen to it again. It's a peculiar poetry coming out of Jan's non-nonsense mouth, but there's more to it than that. There's something odd about the construction. Maybe it's that there's no subjunctive mood, nor any qualifying adjective like "potential" in front of "upside" and "downside." It's as if all of these outcomes, positive and negative, are not hoped for, but certain.
I laughed at the time of watching, of course. But it obviously evoked something for me. I felt a strange resonance to it when I watched it, a resonance that continues. The phrase may have been born of a TV show, and a comedy at that, but there is something about it that continues to demand my attention.
Language is funny. We hear or read something, and sometimes it's like a bell rings inside us. That bell marks the moment when a feeling, heretofore ineffable, takes form. Suddenly a mystery, personal to us, becomes something we can share. It ceases to be solely inside us. Through the words we can connect. Through the words we cease to be alone.