Outward success and internal emptiness
The people who arrive in my office at this point in their lives often look, on paper, like the ones who have figured everything out. They have the careers and the marriages and the houses and the retirement accounts, with the children doing reasonably well in school and the in-laws speaking favorably about them at family gatherings. Their friends describe them as competent, their employers describe them as reliable, and their families describe them as the one who holds everything together. Somewhere in their forties or fifties, or sometimes earlier, they find themselves sitting on a couch across from me trying to explain why they feel almost nothing.
The explanation never comes out clean. They start by describing what they have and naming the things that should be making them feel grateful, listing the accomplishments and the milestones and the markers of a life well-lived. And then somewhere in the middle of the listing, they stop. They look at me, sometimes with their eyes filling, and they say something like, I don’t know what is wrong with me, or, I should be happy, or, this is supposed to be enough. The pause that follows is the part of the conversation I have come to recognize as the real beginning. Underneath the inventory of what they have, there is a question they have been carrying for years, and they have finally arrived somewhere they can ask it.
Whose life is this?
Why does it not feel like mine?
Adults have been asking some version of this question for as long as humans have been building lives. What has become more visible in our current culture is how many people are asking it now, and how disorienting the asking has become because everything around them is telling them their life is exactly what a successful life should look like.
The developmental psychologist Donald Winnicott spent decades working with children and the adults those children eventually became, and his writing contains one of the most useful frameworks I know of for what these people are actually experiencing. He observed that some children grow up in environments where their authentic emotional responses cannot be tolerated by the adults around them. Maybe the parent cannot handle the child’s anger, or finds the child’s sadness inconvenient, or needs the child to be cheerful in order for the parent to feel like a good parent. Whatever the specific arrangement, the child learns very early that what they actually feel is not welcome, and that what is welcome is a different kind of presentation, a version of themselves that pleases the adults, performs the emotions the family system can absorb, and produces day after day exactly what the environment requires.
Winnicott called this constructed version the False Self. He was careful to point out that the False Self is not pathological in itself, and that all of us develop something like it, because the False Self is what allows us to function in a world where being completely authentic at every moment would be socially impossible. The problem comes when the False Self becomes so dominant that it crowds out the underlying True Self. The True Self is what Winnicott called the spontaneous, alive, originating part of the person, the part that has its own desires and reactions and creative impulses that arise from the inside rather than being shaped by what the environment demands. When the False Self takes over completely, the True Self goes into hiding, sometimes for years, sometimes for decades, sometimes for a lifetime if nothing ever happens to bring it back out.
What the people in my office are usually describing when they sit there listing what they have and saying they should be happy is the result of decades of False Self living. The life they built was a False Self construction. The career was what their family approved of, or what their tradition celebrated, or what their culture rewarded. The marriage was the one that fit their family’s expectations of a marriage, the house was the one that signaled they had made it, and the children were raised according to whatever model of parenting they absorbed from the people they were trying to please. Each of these was chosen by the part of them that had been doing the choosing since they were five years old. The True Self might have wanted something else, but it had been silent for so long that no one in the system remembered it was there, including the person themselves.
The exhaustion these people feel is something different than laziness or burnout in the conventional sense. It is the exhaustion of running a life that does not match the person running it. Every day the False Self has to maintain the performance and suppress the small signals from the True Self that try to push through, and every day it has to keep being the version of the person that the surrounding system has rewarded for decades. That is enormous work, and the person doing it does not even know they are doing it, because the work has become invisible through sheer repetition. They just know they are tired in a way that no amount of rest fixes. They sleep on the weekend and wake up Monday already exhausted, they take a vacation and come home feeling worse than when they left, and they retire to discover that the retirement they planned for thirty years has nothing in it that nourishes them, because the planning was done by the False Self too, and the False Self has no idea what the True Self would actually want to do.
This is the part our culture does not have language for. We tell each other stories about how to be successful, how to be a good husband or wife or parent or employee, or how to build a meaningful life. But we don’t tell each other that following all of the rules can produce a life so empty that the person living it begins to wish, in moments they would never admit out loud, that they could start over from somewhere they cannot remember being.
I spent years living a version of this. Not the wealthy version, not the picture-perfect version, but my own working-class manufacturing version. I had a good job that paid the bills, two children I loved, a church community (for a while), a place in the order of things. By every external measure I was doing what a man my age was supposed to be doing. And yet, by the only measure that matters, I was not doing it at all. The man inside the life I was living was someone I had constructed to satisfy the people who needed me to be a certain way before I had any way to consent to becoming him. The exhaustion I carried for most of my adult life was the exhaustion of maintaining a version of myself that the True Self had been trying to escape for decades, on top of the exhaustion of the work itself.
The way I found out was a slow process. It came in small moments rather than in revelations. I would catch myself watching other people who seemed to actually enjoy what they were doing, and I would feel a kind of unfamiliar ache in my chest that I could not name at the time. I would notice that my favorite hours of the week were the hours when I was completely alone, and I would notice that this was strange but I would not let myself ask what it meant. I would read books that disturbed me in ways the books were not designed to disturb people, and I would put them down and forget about them for years, and the disturbing parts would keep coming back. All of these were signals from somewhere underneath the life I was running, signals I could not afford to look at directly because looking at them would have required me to admit that something was wrong with the version of myself I had been performing for decades.
When the True Self finally came online enough to make itself heard, the noise it made was grief rather than joy. There was grief for the years I had spent not living my own life, grief for the choices I had made without knowing I was making them, and grief for the person I might have been if I had been allowed to become him earlier. The grief turned out to be honest rather than bitter. And the honesty became the beginning of a different way of living, one that I am still figuring out, one that has fewer external markers of success than the life I left behind but contains a person I actually recognize when I look in the mirror.
The work of leaving a False Self life is not the work of dramatic exit. Most people who do this work do not quit their jobs or end their marriages or move across the country. They start much smaller, by noticing for the first time in years what they actually want for lunch, by paying attention to which conversations leave them energized and which ones drain them, and by asking themselves at random moments throughout the day, what would I want to be doing right now if no one was watching? The True Self answers these small questions before it ever answers the big ones. And once the True Self has had some practice answering, the bigger questions start to arrive.
The cultural piece this series has been tracing all year is at work here too. The systems we live inside reward False Self functioning, and they have nothing to gain from the True Self coming back online, because the True Self might want different things than the system needs. The True Self might want to work less, or want a marriage based on actual connection rather than appearances, or want a religious faith that is real rather than performed. None of these wants are compatible with the smooth functioning of the systems the False Self has been maintaining, so the systems continue to offer rewards for the performance and to subtly punish any signs that the True Self is waking up.
I spent years sporadically writing in my journal, wrestling with so many aspects of what my False Self had constructed, and the writing slowly gave me glimpses of what my True Self had been wanting all along. Without that deliberate time spent writing in my journal, I would not have been able to hear what my True Self was trying to say. Giving it an outlet where it could be heard and witnessed turned out to be the lifeline I desperately needed. If you are exhausted from feeling like you have been living someone else’s life, what practice could you start that would let you hear your True Self again? Plenty of options exist, and journaling does not have to be the one if writing is not your jam. Start somewhere, though. Anywhere. Your True Self will thank you.
Peace my friends,
~Travis
Up next week: When the System Stops Working
This essay is part of a year-long weekly exploration of how we become who we are, and why change often begins in places we were never taught to look.
