Friday, October 28, 2016

Sufficient

I reread some of my posts from last year while I was at work earlier this week. I wanted to reread some of the posts where I railed against some stuff that was going on in my career. I haven't felt that passionate about my job in years. I was going to use the gradual erosion of my career ambition to make a link between my career and the expertise work of K. Anders Ericsson. At about the same time I was writing posts blasting my manager and the short-sightedness of the organization, I was reading Ericsson's papers about how to develop expertise. I often asked myself how I could apply deliberate practice to my career. It's taken six years, but I finally found a link. I was all set to write about that, but I lost interest in that topic as I started to reread some of my old posts while working back to the original angsty career stuff.

A year ago I was writing about how I strive to be heroic and the centrality of fear in my life. I had forgotten about these posts. They still feel very real and relevant to me, but they're not quite telling the whole story. Those posts are the trail I've left as I've wandered around my own psyche trying to figure out how I can get beyond the self-image issues that have plagued me since I was a kid. Fear is certainly a big part of the picture, but what am I afraid of? The overseer has his role, but what is he really keeping me from? What is so special about the heroic?

I fear being insufficiently masculine. I'm not an aggressive, take charge, macho kind of guy. Part of me feels like that's a big problem. Not the conscious part of me, but some buried deep down  That wasn't good enough for my Dad. I cry at movies. I did it as a kid and I still do it as an adult. I can remember trying very hard not to cry when some character in a movie was dying. That wasn't what real boys did at movies. This is just one way that I had to repress my true nature, to hide who I really am, in order to avoid being made to feel inferior, lacking, not enough. This set up a who dynamic where I sought ways to hide my lack of sufficient masculinity.

This sounded like a trying to hard kind of theory until I started thinking about why I played football. Football provided me with a sense of superiority. I didn't have a strong enough ego to feel like I was adequate just as I am. I used football, a game full of masculine bravado and display, to compensate for my sense that I was insufficiently manly. I felt insufficient in other ways. My acne made me feel like I wasn't physically appealing. I never felt like anybody would want to be with somebody who looked like me.

So I felt like I had to present myself as a big, tough man while feeling like I was physically unappealing. I constantly feared that people would figure out that I was inferior and would ridicule me for all that I failed to be in life. As I thought through this whole dynamic, I had to ask myself, if I didn't feel sufficiently masculine, what model was I using to determine my relative masculinity? My dad was my vision of the ideal male, or at least he has transferred his idea of masculinity to me. My Dad's idol is George Patton. That guy is the ultimate man's man. He was take charge, he was tough, people listened to him. He did what he wanted, sleeping around, acting tough. That's my Dad's idea of what a man should be. That's not what I am. I know if drove my Dad crazy that I wasn't getting all the chicks in high school. He pursued women as a way to compensate for his own sense of inadequacy. I try to fill my own sense of inadequacy by applying to graduate school and different jobs. The decisions that have done the most damage in my marriage are rooted in my need to use something external to feel better about myself. I was constantly fighting a fear that I would be found lacking if I didn't keep demonstrating my superiority. I was afraid of the sense of inferiority that has been with me since I was very young.

I rejected my Dad and his ideals long ago, but my perception that he felt like I didn't measure up to what he wanted me to be lingers deep down in my identity. I've never been satisfied with myself. There is no reason for this. All the striving I write about on this blog is just me trying to find something that will finally make me feel like I'm worth something. If I can just do these few things, I'll be enough. I can fill the absences in my ego with accomplishments. I can find an ego, a sense of who I am and what I'm about, in books, education, or a better title at work.

There is no reason for me to feel inferior. I am enough just as I am. I don't need to keep proving myself to the rest of the world. I just need to accept myself as I am. I don't need to fit a mold or meet some kind of external standard. I am sufficient just as I am.