Last week I had a startling experience during a session with my counsellor. I showed up without my mask.
My mask is my performance. A performance that, well, has kept me alive. It helped me fit in with my family, make it through school, find friends, meet my wife, hold a job, be a functional member of society. On and on. My performance has been so deeply integrated into my life, I thought it was … me.
But it wasn’t. And the evidence is burnout. I burned out because my performance wasn’t sustainable. And my performance wasn’t sustainable because it wasn’t really me.
But I didn’t know that.
I tried every conceivable way to keep the performance going, through all the challenges I’ve faced in my life. And it was going okay … until I became a dad.
When my son was born 4 years ago, I was immediately under-resourced for the experience. Suddenly the margins of error I was used to in life became extremely narrow. I used to be able to get an extension for a challenging homework assignment, or I could take a vacation when work got a little much. But there’s no wiggle room when caring for a tiny human. Every detail really matters. When he was crying at night, he needed immediate help. It wasn’t a negotiation. When he wasn’t getting enough breast milk and was losing too much weight, he needed to go to the ER for auto-toxicity. When my wife had life-threatening postpartum insomnia, I needed to step up and care for him when she was recovering. It didn’t matter if I was disregulated and running on fumes. It just wasn’t optional. My son needed me. My family needed me.
After about a year of fatherhood, I started having crippling panic attacks at work. I was trying everything I knew to self-care, to no avail. I couldn’t work through these panic attacks anymore. These were a much amplified version of the anxiety I’d experienced all my life. But until then I’d just soldiered on. As my Japanese aunt would say, Gamun! Forge a path! No point in whining about it! Hunker down and do what is required! That was my normal.
My new normal was extreme anxiety, all the time. There just wasn’t any opportunities to switch off like I used to when I was living alone. I couldn’t hide in my room for the weekend, watching movies and sleeping. Every moment was now accounted for, and if I took a rest, was it really fair? My wife was going to have to bear the burden herself.
When all my coping mechanisms were failing, I started failing too. It was like watching a train wreck in slow motion. I could see myself gradually crumbling under all the momentum of my life.
Four years later, I’m on a zoom call with my now ex-wife and our separation counsellor. I want to show up strong, showing them that I’ve got my life under control, that I’m a good dad and a responsible member of our family. I want to show that I’m financially stable, and keeping up with the dizzying logistics of parenting separately.
But another part of me could see that I was driving myself into the ground. I wasn’t sleeping well. I wasn’t eating enough. I wasn’t earning enough money. I wasn’t doing anything very well at all. Now the margins were even tighter, and I was dealing with them all alone. I’d built this family life as a team, and now I had to maintain it on my own. And I was sacrificing my physical and mental health to keep it going.
So I asked our counsellor if I could speak plainly, and asked them both to please pay attention.
I told them I was at the end of my rope. If I kept going like this, I was surely going to get very sick. I was experiencing constant, excruciating stress. Even a single meeting on my calendar was enough to give me a panic attack that day. How was I going to marshal the energy for that meeting, and then parent my son in the evening? How was I going to code all day for a job when I could barely sleep the night before?
When I heard these things come out of me, they came with a different voice, a different countenance, a different … me. It wasn’t just a different me, it was MORE me. I could feel a sense of authenticity, of being very exposed, of being without any armour. And I was weeping as I spoke. And my ex-wife was weeping.
My counsellor just said, “PJ, you are a miracle.”
My mask has always been a wall, a suite of armour. And behind the wall I felt all alone. My decision to become a father was really a decision to force myself to confront my mask, to interrogate my true nature, and to finally live in a sustainable way. Will I succeed?