The Space Between Contradictions
On tension, tenderness, and learning to live with all that we are.
Fifteen years ago, I wrote the following about myself in my Match.com profile:
I like both sushi and meatloaf. I like the city and the country. I love being at home, and I love traveling. I can be quiet, calm, and adult — or silly as a child. I can skim lightly across the surface or dive deeply. I can lose myself in the moment, or I can step back, reflect, and make thoughtful choices over time. I can be sharp and insightful, or I can stare at a stove knob for five minutes wondering what to do. I believe that both good times and hard times have their place. I like lively Saturday nights and slow Sunday mornings. I am both independent and relationship-oriented. I am a mix of things that don’t always seem to go together.
That description, written in the playful space of an online dating profile, still rings true. It shows the heart of my daily life: living within contradictions. What once felt like a way to market myself to strangers has become a deeper truth — a steady realization that my life isn’t about choosing one side or the other, but learning to hold both at once.
Carl Jung once said, “The greater the contrast, the deeper the potential. Great energy only comes from a great tension of opposites.” I think he was right. My life, like most lives, has been shaped less by tidy answers than by the pull of truths that don’t easily fit together.
For most of my life, I was trying to figure out who I was. Who is Troy? I was looking for that box to define myself, a place to plant my feet. But over the years, I’ve realized what a fleeting effort that was. Each time I defined one part of myself, I’d quickly see that the opposite was also true.
As humans, we aren’t meant to be simple. We’re made of layers — soft and strong like my grandmother Irene, selfish and generous, fearful and brave. These tensions aren’t flaws to fix but signs of our depth. My friend Randy once said that Jung believed the “gold” of life isn’t found in choosing one side over the other, but in finding meaning in the space between them.
I am both a dreamer and a doer. One moment I’m writing reflections about galaxies, compost, and the mystery of belonging; the next, I’m calculating square footage and negotiating contract deadlines for a real estate client. At first, I thought I had to choose between those selves — the poetic Troy or the practical Troy. But the truth is, both live inside me, and the energy of my life comes from holding them together.
Even in my past corporate work, I saw this dual nature: I was asked to create and design imaginative projects while also managing schedules and budgets from start to finish. I was left brain and right brain, artist and manager, vision and execution.
I am push away and I am pull closer. I enjoy deep connection while also loving my space and time alone. For years, that tension puzzled me — and my partners too. But with time I’ve grown more at ease, more clear: I am both, and I need both.
Similarly, I am both protector and open-hearted. Like the crab, my Cancer sign, I’m simply built this way — tough on the outside with a soft, rich interior. The shell isn’t a flaw but a rhythm, a way of moving between closeness and distance, safety and openness. Sometimes I move sideways through life, cautious and indirect. Other times I pull fully into my shell, waiting for the world to feel safe again. And yet, when I do emerge, I bring with me the richness of that inner world — the creativity, tenderness, and capacity for love that come only with softness.
These aren’t contradictions to fix. They are the tides of who I am, flowing in and out, guarding and revealing. It’s not something to solve. It just is.
Walt Whitman said it best: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes).” Maybe that’s the work of being human — to stop trying to fit into one version of ourselves and instead embrace all the versions, even when they don’t agree.
This is my attempt to honor that space in-between — to see it not as weakness but as texture, not as a flaw but as a sign of being whole.
I keep returning to a photograph I took beneath an old bridge here in Asheville. A faded yellow sign splits traffic into two directions, demanding a choice: left or right, one side or the other. On the bridge itself, the word Festus is scrawled — both biblical and absurd. And there, stranded in the median, sits an abandoned cart draped in a tarp, both home and burden, resilience and ruin. Even the bridge is a contradiction — solid yet crumbling, connecting while dividing.
The whole scene mirrors the way I live: armored and tender, solitary and seeking, carrying both the weight of protection and the softness of love. It reminds me that contradiction isn’t something to solve but something to live with — like traveling a split road and learning to make a home in the in-between.
It makes me wonder — what if we widened the lens on how we see each other, too? Most people aren’t one thing or the other; they’re both. We all carry some mix of fear and bravery, selfishness and generosity, armor and openness. Maybe compassion begins when we can hold that complexity in others as gently as we try to hold it in ourselves.
