Can You See Me Now?

On seeking external validation

Photo by Noah Buscher on Unsplash

Last fall, I paid a visit to my brother. He lives on the opposite coast from me and I don’t often make it out to visit (over the past fifteen years or so, I’ve been half the planet away in terms of distance). One practice I’ve tried to adhere to when talking to siblings is to not let our discussion revolve around our parents. It’s too easy to do so – our parents’ behaviour has often been so egregious, so beyond what might be considered normal, that we could spend an entire wedding or funeral or graduation or whatever event we’re attending talking about nothing else. And when this is the situation for several decades, you realize you’ve got to actively try to talk about topics other than your parents and their latest drama.

Nonetheless, one parent was grating on everyone’s nerves so terrifically that we couldn’t resist indulging in the subject. Sometimes you need to air your grievances to move past them. My brother then mentioned that he’d talked to my father relatively recently. “Did you know,” he casually remarked, “that Dad was actually buying cocaine directly from the cartel after he lost everyone’s money in the 2008 Financial Crisis?”

No. No, I did not know that. I knew he was using crack after I found an online record of his jail booking a year or two later. But I didn’t know he was buying cocaine wholesale, one might say, and dealing. I suppose it wasn’t surprising. After all, he was living in a border town.

My brother went on to relate a story about how around that time, he’d returned to the border town where my father lived and found himself bumping into people from high school. “Your dad is awwwwesooooome,” they’d say. He couldn’t figure out why everyone suddenly seemed to know – and even more bizarrely, love – our father, of all people.¹ But upon hearing this information about the cartel, everything instantly made sense.

And of course, there’s a much larger story here about my father being shunned by the religious sect that kept him in line for 25 years, losing the stature and identity he’d acquired within. About how he rebuilt both by working as a wealth fund manager for a top investment bank, making risky bets that paid off for the clients he’d collected in that town – how they looked at him as though he were a sort of god. About how $20 million of his portfolio evaporated overnight during the 2008 crisis and he’d lost those client relationships, too. About how, while continuing to manage that portfolio, he’d decided to start dealing. And about how, in jail at retirement age, he’d crowed over the phone to my brother that “I’m the strongest I’ve ever been” as he gambled away his third retirement, his recklessness infamous among the inmates.

It suddenly dawned on me what my father was really addicted to: adulation. On a visceral level, he craved a crowd of admirers. He didn’t care whether that crowd was one of church elders, investors, university-age partiers, inmates, or even his (many) children. He desperately needed to feel the faces of everyone in his vicinity turned towards him as though he were the sun, gracing them with the light that would spawn life on their grim little planets. I think this validation effectively gave him a sense of self-worth – without it, I don’t think he thought he was worth anything at all.

And I realized that I, too, had been looking for external validation instead of reaching within and establishing my own sense of self-worth.

According to LinkedIn, surely the anglophone world’s foremost expert on the subject, external validation stems from the approval and recognition we receive from others. That recognition can tell us how we should feel about ourselves. Without it, some people don’t have any sense of self at all.

This was doubtlessly the case for my father. As he was gradually pushed out of the religious circles that had anchored his life for the better part of three decades, he was also pushed out of a business partnership he’d embarked on with some fellow churchgoers. My father is a complicated man; he scored exceptionally high on IQ tests and aced his Series 7 around the age of 50, but I suspect he still believes in a literal, seven-day creation of the Earth by God. He is intellectually bright and deeply, deeply motivated by money, yet spent the better part of his adult life in a Christian sect that rejected materialism and equated wealth with mammon. He also suffers from at least one untreated mental illness and perhaps a cognitive issue, too, as he’s always had a markedly poor understanding of boundaries – especially in social settings.

My father fell into the world of finance at the tail end of four interminable years of unemployment after his business partnership fell apart. He told us he was “day trading” but in reality, he was losing money hand over fist and cashing out his retirement when he wasn’t convincing his teenaged children to fork over their life savings so he could purchase penny stocks. Month by month, tensions intensified as money swirled the drain to exit our lives. The massive house we’d moved into decayed. There were no more trips to doctors or dentists let alone shopping or meals out. No Costco runs to stock the refrigerator for the seven or eight children still living at home. Instead, we all began working as soon as we were able to be legally employed.

After a decade and a half as a stay-at-home parent to eight children, my mother also began to work. Childcare was never an option and instead of falling to the oldest children, it just seemed to . . . fall by the wayside. My mother returned from an extended trip abroad once to discover that my father, tasked with caring for the children who couldn’t fend for themselves, had failed to feed anyone. My youngest sibling had lost an alarming amount of weight and was hoarding food under her bed. Dad’s method of care was to call for whomever was within shouting distance to come along as he left the house on Saturdays, headed to McDonald’s where he would spend hours and hours chatting with a circle of other men from the town – all Dutch farmers with money to invest. It was a time of Survival of the Fittest and the youngest children drew the shortest straws.

For much of those four years, my father walked around in a daze. Mentally, he was adrift with no direction. If he wasn’t making money, who was he? I don’t think he had the slightest clue.

When my father finally got hired at the investment bank thanks to an offhand comment from a neighbour, who correctly perceived that he was “obsessed with money and would do great in the position,” he turned those farmers into clients. He turned the old contacts from our church (the ones who would still speak to him, anyway) into clients, as well. He pulled on every string he had to draw money out of people and into the market. And he made them rich, too, with unusually high rates of return – not because he was pulling a Madoff-style Ponzi scheme, but because he got off on the rush of a high-stakes gamble.

That is, until half of his portfolio evaporated when the market collapsed. The social structures of his life collapsed alongside it as his third career imploded. And although he remained at the bank,² although he still made plenty of money, I guess he decided he needed to find a new source of validation, a new group of acolytes to look at him in awe. He also had a new retirement saved up and plenty of money to blow on blow.

Several years ago, I, too, re-started my life. I had been living abroad and it turned out the two careers I’d nourished over a 15-year period didn’t, for one reason or another, transfer all that smoothly. I ended up at a loss for what to do and decided to take a break from work for the first time in my life (well, I worked in a coffee shop. I considered that a break).

I was surprised at the intensity of my feelings during this period. After months of introspection, I realized I was living in fear that what had happened to my father – a failure to transition that stretched on for years as we tumbled into poverty, food stamps and every other benefit we could access piling up – would happen to me. I was deathly afraid I would perhaps not ever transition and not ever again make the kind of salary I had only just started earning in my mid-30s. Would I also spin off the rails or simply be doomed to grind it out forever?

Moving back to my home country, which I’d left as a child, proved unexpectedly difficult. After a decade of living in a non-Western country with a developing economy, I found there were so many things to get accustomed to. There were so many things I used to know how to do but had long forgotten. It didn’t help that absolutely no one was particularly sympathetic to my plight. When I first arrived, my aunt tossed me the keys to her car and said, “The house is three hours down the highway. Have fun!” I hadn’t driven in at least ten years. My shoulders and arms were sore for days afterwards as I’d white knuckled the steering wheel for hours, desperately trying to remember how to use a clutch.

I began to suffer from fairly acute social anxiety and had trouble looking anyone in the eye. Something about it seemed too intimate and my sense of alienation was so strong, I couldn’t seem to connect with anyone at all. After around a year that included watching the political dismantling of my former home via the news, my mind was in a pretty dark place. Why did no one ever seem to see me? Why did I feel invisible to everyone – was I even here? Why couldn’t someone just acknowledge how hard this all was? Everything was so hard, all at once, and virtually no one seemed to care. I wasn’t a new immigrant exactly, but everything was new. Everything was unfamiliar. Nothing worked like I expected it to or thought it should.

I also started to meet other parents through my son’s classmates and see, for the first time, what mid-life looks like when you don’t move from place to place to place. It looks like beautiful homes. It looks like ease. It looks stable and welcoming. The view resurrected an old anger that had initially emerged when I was a new undergraduate discovering just how much help other people were still getting from their parents.

I eventually overcame my social anxiety enough to date very casually, and ended up falling into a relationship when I least expected it. That relationship did much to strengthen my emotional resilience, but I still had days and weeks where I struggled with basic tasks. I cried as I figured out the health care system. I had massive anxiety about filing my taxes. I raged about a job market I found impossible to navigate, and it felt like each day demanded that I put myself in an uncomfortable situation, that I change myself in order to assimilate, again and again and again.

There was a point a few months ago, as I went through an emotionally excruciating breakup, where it dawned on me that I had to change the story of my life. It couldn’t just be a narrative of me moving through one hardship after another. Somewhere in that narrative, there had to be space for me to simply just . . . live. Live in a state of contentment, of satisfaction, free from fear of failure.

Now that I didn’t have a relationship at stake, I was willing to let my mind entertain possibilities I hadn’t considered before. It hit me, perhaps for the first time, that no one was ever going to care for me the way I wanted to be cared for – and that was okay. Because I could care for myself. I could give myself the things I needed. And in doing so, I could get over myself once and for all. All those messages I’d absorbed from self-development podcasts and therapy clicked into place, clearing my vision at last.

With this knowledge, I could see that I would be okay. My life had just blown up and all my fears had come true, but I would be okay. I didn’t need anyone around me to tell me how hard things had been or how much I’d grown. I didn’t need someone else to remind me I was strong and could endure so, so much more than the average person because I’d already done so many times. I could reach deep and find my own strength from within. I knew how hard things had been. And I knew I’d made it through and it didn’t matter whether anyone else knew it or not.

When my brother recounted what my father had told him, it solved a mystery that had never made sense to any of us. Why had my father turned to dealing drugs? It wasn’t as though he really needed the money. He had plenty of income³ and several pensions to draw from; his employers didn’t force him into retirement until they caught wind of his burgeoning criminal record several years later. I could never quite identify a motive other than a chronic penchant for self-destruction or perhaps his untreated bipolar disorder, but hearing about how he’d used dealing to create a new circle of people thrilled to have him around explained everything.

It also revealed his lack of self-worth, which I’d failed to see as he’d always had delusions of grandeur. Among us children growing up, he was infamous for a phrase that epitomizes narcissism: “There’s a right way and a wrong way to do things, and my way is the right way.” Dad always thought he was better than virtually everyone else. We were all failures compared to him. So how could it be that he lacked self-worth?

Yet he did. He was an empty vessel that needed to be filled with the admiration of others in order to feel intact. Without that admiration, without that stature in the eyes of others, he was nothing but a void. He couldn’t go through life without spinning out into an extended depression, purposeless and barely able to function.

Here’s the thing about internal validation: it helps us learn to accept, and therefore value, ourselves. I can give myself the validation that I sought for so many years. Yes, transitioning back to a wealthy country with an advanced economy was incredibly difficult. Yes, being a single mother is difficult. Yes, my recent breakup was awful. Yes, the academic job market is trash. And yes, I’m going to be okay. I may have to do more difficult things, but I can handle them without letting my difficulties become the only story I tell about my life.

This is my emancipation from my past, from my parents. This is what leads me down a different path – one that won’t be marked by substance abuse and arrests and depression and court dates and the grind of never enough money. I can trust myself to make better decisions than my parents did, because I always have. I can trust myself to ask for help from others, to rebuild again and again as needed, because I know my own capabilities. And life will give me good things, too, because I deserve them as much as anyone else does.

I can see me now.

For more on my family background, see:

PART I: My Doubting Mind

1. Our father is not a lovable person. He is a very very acquired taste. I could speculate as to why but I’m not aware of any specific diagnoses, so I’ll leave it at that.

2. In fact, he remained Vice President of the bank. The only reason he wasn’t President was due to his inability to read social cues. Finance rewards those who generate wealth.

3. Theoretically. He also had a gambling habit and, between criminal and family court, what must have been astronomical lawyers’ fees. But you’d think someone in finance would work on the gambling habit as opposed to turning to crime.