Confusion with a doppelganger transforms bitterness into intimate curiosity

Evidence

Being chronically confused with another person may be humiliating, but that’s not all it is. It is also an oddly intimate experience. The boundaries between you and alter-you begin to wear down, becoming thin, even diaphanous. Their problems are your problems, their shame your shame. A doppelganger is your trail, your shadow, a bit like in the biblical story from which we derive our name, in which Ruth proclaims to Naomi: “Where you go, I will go, and where you stay I will stay.” Perhaps this is why I became, increasingly, not bitter or angry about the confusion, but intensely interested. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 148

Categorization

• SEED: The Ruth-and-Naomi framing of involuntary kinship with a political opposite is an angle: how forced identification with an enemy creates a kind of reluctant solidarity — worth an essay on the ethics of being mistaken for what you despise.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s own recorded note on silenced living people and exploited groups, and to literary doubling themes in The Reluctant Fundamentalist and We.