Crisis of Confidence

I've been feeling a bit low and unmotivated recently. My wife expressed her concern by pointing out how touchy I've been with my kids recently. Stuff that normally wouldn't affect me has been making me very grouchy. I hadn't really thought much about it until she said something. As I've been reflecting on my mood and how I've been feeling, I can't help but notice a lack of positive ego events in the last couple of months. The things in my life that normally give me a little boost and make me feel good about myself just haven't been there recently.

I'm happy to have my new manager role at work, but I'm not doing the kinds of things that gave me a sense of accomplishment. I'm not getting things done in the lab. I don't have a set of tasks that I can complete and feel good about getting them done. Then there's the challenge of getting through the uncertainty of whether or not I'm doing my new job right. I don't have much feedback about how people are responding to me being their leader. I used to know when I did something that would impact the organization. I'm not so sure any more.

My workouts are not going well this summer. We've taken many trips already and all that traveling messes up the time I have to workout. I need to get to bed soon so I'll be ready to get up and run tomorrow. After much deliberation, I registered for the Patrick Henry half-marathon last week. I've been running, but I've struggled with the long runs. Pacing is my big problem, but I just don't feel like I'm where I want to be when it comes to my fitness. My concerns started with my Monument Ave 10k time and things have just continued to deteriorate over the summer.

I'm not losing weight. If anything, I'm gaining weight. All those trips mean more eating out. Coupled with the reduced workouts, that's not a good combination. So I'm feeling bad about myself physically. I've never really felt bad about my body, and I'm not sure I would say that I feel bad about my body now. I guess I'm just disappointed in myself for not having a stronger commitment to my health.

I've had some project running in the background for the last several years. LSAT prep, MBA classes, there's been something that provided a steady stream of stuff to my ego fire. I don't have anything like that going on right now. I have a project, but it's not something that provides constant feedback. I'm the only one who's seen it since I started working on it. I haven't written an Amazon review or even done much writing here. These posts don't get many views, but I appreciate seeing that somebody has looked at something I've written.

Assuming that there is something to this idea that my confidence is a little shaky right now because I'm not getting my usual diet of ego reinforcement, that says something pretty significant about my self-image. That something is also undermining my confidence and contributing to my depression. The crisis of confidence is also a bit of identity crisis. Damn, this is tough.

This is what I want

My 20 year high school reunion is this year. I'm not going, but the invitation that came in the mail a couple of days ago made me think about that kid who set off for college with a very distorted view of the world. I can't help but wonder what he would think of my life. He probably wouldn't have much of an opinion. There are no grades or competitions to help him put it into perspective. I also can't help but wonder what I'll think of my life when I get to my 40 year reunion. At 18, I didn't really have any long term aspirations. Other than finally getting laid, I don't think I had any real goals in life. I just wanted to do things that other people would find impressive. I got lucky and that approach worked out well for me over the last 20 years, but I'm not certain that's the way I want to approach the next 20 years of my life. I know it's not. I will be the active agent in the next phase of my life. I will express my needs to the world, and take specific actions to make those wants, needs, and desires a reality.

I took the first step towards being the active agent in my life by starting a bucket list. I've never committed long term aspirations to paper before today. That's too aggressive. If I say it, other people will know what I want and I can be judged for it. It forces me to take a stand. This wasn't an exercise in daydreaming. This was an attempt to force myself to express what I want to accomplish. The kind of things that I might look back on in 20 years and say, man, I wish I had done that thing before I was 58. Here's my list (in no particular order):

Write a book
Vacation on a tropical island
Take my kids to Disney World
Run a sub-50 minute 10K
Read Ulysses and War & Peace
Go to an NFL game
Learn a swimming stroke and use it to swim at least 1 mile in the ocean
Visit New York City
Complete a marathon
Own a Porsche
Publish a paper in a chemistry journal as the principal investigator

These may not be as ambitious and exotic as some other people's aspirations, but to realize some of these desires I will need to definitive steps to making them happen. And that's the point. Sure, I could wait around and see if an opportunity to go to a football game presents itself, but why not take action to make that happen for myself? That's the rub of this list. It's not so much the difficultly of achieving these goals that's make them relevant. Other than writing a book, the basic infrastructure to achieve these goals is already in place. The relevance comes in expressing a desire to want something. The list may get more ambitious and exotic with time, but simply stating that I want to do these things is more than I ever did when I graduated high school. Sharing these desires with other people (I showed my wife the list earlier tonight) is yet another relevant step. It's not to get people to keep me on track to realizing these goals, but to share my desires and not fear people's judgement of those goals.

I've spent too much of my hiding. I've stayed where it's nice and safe. It's time to dare, to desire, to want. It's time to be me.

Give

The signs have been popping up all around me. This weekend forced them into enough of a critical mass that they fused into something that my closed, protective, and very hidebound brain could actually recognize. I've been telling myself that I need to dig deeper into my past, my likes, my tendencies to figure out who I am so I can pursue that rather than sticking to the patterns that were instilled in me before I could weigh in on just what was happening to me. That's wrong. That's just the route to more of the same. That route would likely lead to more of the same. More self-absorption, more failure to realize what the people around me need from me. The same old closed life will continue.

I need to give. Most of my life has been one of taking. I was finally able to articulate to myself how I approach social relationships earlier today. I want to be respected/appreciated/revered based on what I've accomplished (big reputation). I want people to like me, but I don't want to participate in the social exchange. I want to do my own thing, have people totally understand my need to do those things, see my actions totally in light of my own internal rationalization scheme, give me what I need from them, while they're happy to have me around and gladly take what I offer without actually wanting anything else. I want people to give me what I need without giving them anything.

At some level, I'm pretty sure that my pursuit of status objects, degrees, jobs, accomplishments of one sort or another, is my way of gaining social currency. I won't approach other people. I won't be open with them, do what I can to make them feel welcomed and comfortable, so I collect little tokens of what I can do and hope people will be happy with that. Impress them with my physical presence, let them know that I'm so good at this and that, and get them to appreciate that I'm special in some way.

It's very twisted. I can tell myself that it's how I managed to integrate myself into a new social structure every few years when I was a kid. By being the football player and the good student, that identity would get me to what I needed in my new surroundings. I could take what I needed, feel safe, and not worry much about anybody else. My dad is this way. His running streak, pathetic use of big words, military career, these are the things that he wants people to see. He can't offer himself to other people. He can't set aside his needs and do something for somebody else. He can't see what other people need. He built a shrine to himself in his head and assumes that it is his ticket to society. He sits around and waits for other people to come to him rather than going out to other people.

I only delve into possible origins on my own crazy thinking to remind myself that my tendencies came from outside of me. It's what I've been programmed to do. I'm not a victim of this programming. I can choose to fight against this natural tendency and put the needs of others before my own needs. At the core of it, my struggles are really about how to set aside my own needs. I'm happy to take what others are willing to offer. It's easy to passively sit around and enjoy other people's offerings. It's harder to be the one giving the gift. The gift of attention, the gift of time, the gift of myself. The route out of my sheltered life is not through a better appreciation of my needs. It's through a surrendering of what I want to make a gift of myself to others and giving them what they need.

My fitness level, taking a longer view

I found some of my 5K results from back in 2005 and 2007 on the web. This distance is relevant because I ran a 5K on Saturday morning. All 3 races were run on pretty much the same course (same starting point and some of the same stretches of road, but there have been a few modifications made over the years). Both of my earlier times were over 31 minutes. That's a 10 minute mile. I did the run in 24:29 on Saturday. If you had told the 29 year old me that I would be running a 5K in the just under 8 minutes a mile at 38, I would have been very excited. I'm pretty sure that time is a PR for me, at least in actual races, so I'm actually pretty excited about it now! 

Training is such a now thing, it's interesting to take a step back to see just how far I've come over the years! (And the irony is not lost on me that I'm looking at race times, the epitome of a quantifiable goal, while giving myself a hard time for focusing on quantified goals a few days ago.)

Shut up!

My new resolution is to ignore the voice in my head that tells me that my feelings/thoughts/opinions about a particular topic are wrong. Part of me thinks that sentence is wrong. It's too...obvious. There must be hundreds of self help books that contain a similar sentiment. Shouldn't I try to make that statement novel and MY OWN! Why should I do that? Doesn't the fact that the sentence reflects my thought at the moment be sufficient? Well yes, of course it does.

Why should I feel the need to put this sentence out on the internet where anybody can read it? Because I feel like it. It's just something that I want to do. I used to tell myself that I wrote things here so I could go back and read it later. These entries would be some kind of record of my thought process that I could go back and mine for insights or to see how I change with time. (It's important for me to see how I change with time because I'm in a constant struggle to keep getting better, a struggle that I'm struggling to understand. Maybe I should just accept it as part of me and be done with it...) The sad truth is I have a hard time rereading many of my entries. I get bored with them. I find myself a little boring and pedantic.

Perhaps those boring and pedantic entries, where I so earnestly wrestle with weighty career topics or offer myself pep talks for getting better, are the ones that appeal to the voice that tells me I'm wrong. Those entries reflect a topic with substance and significance. If that voice makes its impact here, it make its impact in other places as well. It's everywhere and unavoidable.

That doesn't mean I can't ignore it. That voice is the self-stealer. It makes we do what I think I should rather than what feels right. It aims to protect. It wants me to do what it feels is safe rather than letting me do what feels right in the moment. It wants me to fit in and do what is expected rather than to do what I want without really worrying too much about if it's the accepted thing to do.

I'm tuning that voice out, or at least recognizing it when it tries to put in its two cents. It's been drowning out the other parts of me for way too long.

It's all about the numbers

I've been struggling to prove something to somebody for most of my life. The motivation to do something, play football, completing a video game, applying for jobs I have no intention of actually taking, trying to beat my best time during a rowing or running workout, a considerable chunk of my motivation to do those things was driven by a need for a sense of accomplishment by achieving something that other people could see. Activities that should be about having fun, playing video games for example, became a contest. I immediately grasp onto the competitive aspect of any activity rather than focusing on what I find inherently appealing about it. 

A good portion of the entries in this blog are about getting better, pushing your limits, constantly striving for more and better. That endless striving for improvement, a constant seeking of some edge over an ambiguous other outsider, constantly hangs over me. There is nothing wrong with wanting to improve, but that drive to get better has skewed my priorities. Those things that I do to feel like I'm getting better have far too much importance in my life. I neglect the people I love to keep striving for more. 

Chasing after something to make me feel like I am winning, that I am better than everybody else, that I am adequate, has in many ways prevented me from really getting to understand what I enjoy. I never stopped to look at what appeals to me when I was looking at colleges. Even now, a key motivator for me in getting my workouts in is making progress towards a distance goal. I want 2 million lifetime meters in rowing by the end of the year. I've resolved to run 500 miles this year. This blog was started to track my progress towards a number of quantifiable goals. 

Until I started writing this post, I didn't realize how I've built achieving a numerical goal into so much of my life. That effort to achieve an arbitrary number goal, a certain time in a race, a certain number of books read, so many blog posts written in a week, is at the center of pretty much every "leisure" time activity that I pursue. Why do I deny myself the inherent pleasure of these activities?What do I really like to do? Am I missing out on something that I would really enjoy in the constant pursuit of tracking my progress?

Living in a fantasy world

My brother once told me he was a sex addict. I thought he was talking about compulsively having sex with loads of women, but he was really talking about being a porn addict. I'm not surprised that one of us ended up developing that habit. The more I look at my prototypical adults, my parents, the more I see the template of my inward orientation. Watching your parents either pull on head phones to read a book about Patton or sit and do cross stitch all night doesn't exactly set the stage for me to pour out my feelings at the first opportunity. A porn addiction is about as inward as it gets. You sit alone and satisfy yourself with fantasy images. There's no complexity or depth to the experience. It's stunting rather than expanding. 

Something like a porn addiction shrinks your world. You get so fixated on what's in you, you don't get a chance to really interact with the world. That's the inward orientation. The world gets filtered through whatever need you're trying to satisfy with your fantasy world. My brother turned to sexual images on the internet. I turned to the promise of jobs in Boston or the potential of pursing a law degree. My dad dreamed of being a powerful military leader. 

These were just fantasies. Fantasies are distractions. I can't rewind my life to see what would have happened if I hadn't spent pretty much one year applying to law school. Sure my employer was going through a bit of a transition at the time, but that was really just an excuse. Law school was something that I could pursue without having to worry about how things would actually turn out. There was little risk, but there was plenty of reward for somebody who puts a great deal of stock in what strangers think of him. It felt really good to get accepted into all those schools, but who knows what I would have done if I had been focused on something that would actually improve my life. I could have done something to improve my career prospects. I could have gotten a paper published with a comparable level of effort. I could have started digging into all the crap that I've been plowing through for the last couple of weeks. I could have worked out harder, read more books, or done something that would have had some kind of measurable benefit on to my life. Instead, I spent tons of energy on something that wasn't going to really going to change anything. 

But the fact that I spent so much energy on that project must say something about me. What drove me to spend all that effort for a few emails offering me a spot in their law school class? I wanted validation that I was better than all those other people who also applied. I wanted to win at something. I wanted a little badge that noted that I was able to do something that others couldn't accomplish. Maybe it was comparable to training for a marathon or an Ironman, to distinguish myself from those who were unable. That's overly generous. I just wanted something of little consequence to strive for. I didn't want to do the work to make my life better, but I wanted to do something that made me think I was doing something constructive. 

My Boston saga (I'm really going to need to add some links to this post) is another good illustration of how I've shuffled energy into something that doesn't really matter. I liked the idea of something different, a fresh start, because it saved me the trouble of confronting the real issues that I was facing. Rather than finding a way to improve my situation, I took comfort in finding the possibility of a way out, a route that I never would have taken. I can dig deep into my history to find where I used the allure of an unreal fantasy to help me deal with the struggles of my life. The alternative world of a video game was preferable to actually confronting high school or college life. I could have been out trying to experience something that college life had to offer, but instead I retreated to the comfort of Tetris. Predictable, safe, and risk free is always better than risking your ego to the whims of other people's fancy when you're entire orientation is inward.

Going out is too risky when all you do is look in. Every interaction with the outside is a challenge to who you are. I wanted the world to tell me that the image that I had of myself was real rather than interacting with other people and trying different things to find out who I really was. I avoided what was around me in order to make sure I didn't find out who I really was. I had to stay the same so the people who mattered in my life would keep loving me. They made me who I was to serve their needs. Becoming who I was meant to be would put an end to their fantasy.