The Elevator Down: Life After the Severance Procedure

This article appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here.

I awake from surgery screaming, my hands pressed against the sides of my face, unable to open my eyes. The nurses try to unlock my body from its rigid position, startled by my reaction to what had been a common foot procedure. They are unaware that while my body is sitting in the present, my mind is experiencing a past that I don’t dare open my eyes and see. The emergence from anesthesia has left my brain stranded in a moment 10 years prior: a surgery that had gone horribly wrong—my severance procedure.

“Severance” has taken on new meaning since an Apple TV science fiction series of the same name premiered in 2022. The term refers to the operation in which the white-collar workers at the mysterious Lumon Industries have their brains surgically split between two distinct personalities: their work life self, the “Innie;” and their personal self, or “Outie.” While both the Innie and the Outie possess the same body, they have access to separate parts of the mind that are unable to communicate with each other, save for the rare—and terrifying—moments when there is a breach in the system. And while Severance characters like Mark S., Helly R., Irving B., and Dylan G. are fictional, the process is very real.

For the past decade, I have been living with complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD), or what I refer to as my own version of severance. This diagnosis came as a result of my suffering septic shock after multiple botched total colectomies, the coma that followed, and my still daily battle of living as a disabled person.

Severance is, quite literally, the first time I’ve seen my life accurately depicted on screen. It beautifully demonstrates the terror of what it’s like to, in a mere matter of seconds, be unwillingly transported into another part of your brain; a part that doesn’t recognize or remember all of you but is adamant that its version of reality is the right one. The series, brought to life by director Ben Stiller and creator Dan Erickson, illustrates how touching a certain texture or hearing a specific noise can suddenly become transformative. What occurs in one moment, when triggered by the “elevator” of something else, completely dissolves into another.

Some days, I am Irving, a gruesome black ink seeping its way between my two worlds: a clear view of love and hope in one life, blurry vision and a distorted reality in another. Other days, I am Dylan, attempting to find work while disclosing my severed state. My efforts to find my place in the already highly selective world of film and television, while confessing my limitations, are beyond disheartening. In place of our desires, Dylan and I are reluctantly given the consolation prize of a pineapple fruit basket and encouragement to re-mask our inner turmoil.

More often than not, I am Mark: forced into a metaphorical elevator in an attempt by someone, often unintentionally, to thrust me back into the manageable version of myself that knows how to blend in. I switch between nervous systems, always questioning why my end-of-the-day Outie feels none of the benefits of my daytime, suppressing Innie. All while knowing that no one in my family, despite their loving attempts to help, could possibly understand the experience of living in my body—to know what it’s like to risk everything in an attempt to feel whole again.

My therapy sessions look identical to Mark’s camcorder conversation with himself in the season two finale: that back-and-forth dialogue between parts in an attempt to make one understand the motives of the other, and the desperation of trying to have each one appreciate, as best they can, that neither is a threat to the other. Like Mark, I drink the reintegration sludge in the form of intense therapy treatments that attempt to connect me back to my body but leave me physically ill.

The biggest reality to grapple with for both Lumon employees and me is the understanding that we all underwent this irreversible procedure under the promise of a new life, only to find out the hard way that the word “new” was not synonymous with “better.” Like all my friends at Lumon, a company founded with the mission of ending all human suffering, I was robbed of the life advertised by this procedure, suffocating under the understanding that I can never go back to who I used to be.

In April 2025, I attended a Severance press event at the real-life building that serves as the set of Lumon headquarters just outside my hometown in Holmdel, New Jersey. Teetering on my surgical boot in the standing room only section, I watched as Ben Stiller turned to the crowd and, as if thinking out loud, mused, “I’d love to know what it is about Severance that makes viewers connect with it so much.” While I can’t speak for the approximately six percent of the world population who suffer from C-PTSD, for me, Severance is an hour of exploration where I have nothing to do but wait and see what else I learn about myself. More than that, it reminds me why film and television have been, and forever will be, the only thing I want to do with my life. I’ve dreamt of acting in a project like Severance, playing a character as impactful as the ones in the series; an instrument in a critical symphony, telling a tragic story in a breathtaking way. 

Severance reflects the greatest challenge of my life: how to reintegrate. How to become as whole as possible, given the seemingly irreversible changes to my body and brain. 

For me, Severance isn’t a mystery; it’s an explanation.