WillSpirit!

Is middle age meant to be a series of humbling experiences? Or is that just my reality? So many episodes have occurred to highlight my limitations, that it seems like my primary task in mid-life has been the learning of my own scale relative to others and the world at large.

Growing up, my stepmother repeatedly and ferociously insisted I was worthless, ugly, dimwitted, and unlovable. On the other hand, my narcissistic father basked in his so-called ‘brilliance’, and seldom hesitated to brag about his accomplishments and intelligence.

For whatever reason, I never completely believed my stepmother. My only alternative, it seemed at the time, was to emulate my father. If he was brilliant, I’d prove the same true of me. If he was accomplished, I would be too.

The school system nudged me in this direction also. If I wasn’t getting attention by causing trouble, I was getting it with my ability to score well on tests. After several arrests and my girlfriend’s expulsion from our high school (because of something we did as a team), I finally understood that the attention garnered by good grades had value, but the attention attracted by rebellion seldom payed off. After the two of us started living together in Berkeley, I buckled down and became a fully committed student.

The effort bore fruit. Not instantly, but over the next seventeen years as I worked through college, grad school, med school, internship, residency, and two fellowships, I built up a solid CV and gathered the skills needed to make a nice living at a prestigious job.

If anyone looked closely, they could see that my performance was not steady. Long stretches of great accomplishment were marred by spells of mediocrity. Although most terms I earned only A or A+ grades, periodically a bad spell would hit and my marks would plummet; my first term in graduate school I took ‘incompletes’ in most of my classes. Most interviewers overlooked this inconstancy, but some commented on it. Either way, I kept succeeding, and kept getting accepted to the programs and jobs I wanted.

It was clear to me that my moods and performance were unstable, but it wasn’t a big problem. Puffed up by success, I internally exaggerated my power and intelligence. Rather than examining my many hesitancies and weaknesses, I focused on my achievements. I bolstered a dismal core self-esteem by developing an image of myself as brilliant and highly accomplished. Without understanding the dangers, I emulated my father’s hubris as much as his success. It’s not that I ever looked down on others; I truly didn’t. But I did think of myself as more or less invulnerable.

Then I hit my wall. In short order I not only lost my surgical career (because neck disease made it impossible for me to continue operating), but my instability exploded into full-blown mood crises. In the ten years since, I’ve repeatedly found out how limited I truly am. The old arrogance, and the sense of being super smart and capable of attaining almost any goal, are completely gone.

I don’t miss those attributes. Not one bit. But it hasn’t been easy getting to a point of acceptance and humility. In order for me to integrate my losses and my limits, and in order to build a balanced and healthy personality, I’ve had to develop a sense of self that doesn’t rely on external validation. This was a real challenge for someone whose unhappy parents fought bitterly from his earliest memory and divorced when he was four, whose mother killed herself when he was six, and who was then on raised by a sociopathic, sadistic stepmother and an alcoholic, narcissistic father. After spending early adulthood intensely focused on external goals, I now see that learning to love myself probably represents my most difficult accomplishment.

The paradox is that in order to gain affection for myself, I had to recognize my insignificance. I had to understand that neither my failures nor my successes matter. I needed to learn that my skills and intelligence do not stand out that much, and that nothing about me makes me exceptional. Yes, I’m unique, as we all are. But I am not special.

This comes as a great relief. I once felt that my so-called gifts conferred on me the burden to prove myself. Now I see that my only responsibility is to help out to the extent I am able. It doesn’t have to be earth-changing, it doesn’t have to be dramatic. To settle my debts, I only need to do a little to ease the widespread pain on this earth.

The problem with feeling special is that ‘specialness’ cuts both ways. It always seemed to me that if I didn’t demonstrate myself to be equal to my father, then my stepmother would have been proven right. Only very recently did I recognize that the alternative to great success appeared, in my mind, to be utter worthlessness. My childhood set me up for that false dichotomy.

At long last, I understand that the alternative to being special is to be human. Apparently I needed a long series of humbling setbacks to attain this knowledge. Life provides the lessons we require for wisdom. Our task is to learn from them.