02 My Light – Spot 2

I am sitting in the car. Outside my own front door. The engine is off. Today they told me: they don’t need me any more. After twelve years. A box with my things is on the back seat.

The lights are on inside. My wife is cooking, my son is doing his homework. They don’t know yet. And I can’t go in. I just sit there and stare at the front door.

How am I supposed to say it? How do I look her in the eye? My head goes hot, something tightens in my chest.

I can’t provide for my family any more. What kind of a man am I.

What is rising up in me has a name. Shame. And shame is insidious. It doesn’t say: you have lost your job. It says:You are a failure.Not the act. Not the situation. Me. Entirely.

My head is burning, my stomach is a stone. I want to disappear, dissolve, simply be gone. Anything not to be seen.

And in my head the loop is running.You’re no good. You never had it in you. Look at yourself.Over and over.

Why does it hit me so deep? It is only a job. Because my head makes no distinction between today and back then. For my little one this is not a lost job. It is a threat to his life.

As a child I depended on my family. Belonging meant surviving. Anyone who was cast out was lost. That fear has been sitting in us for ten thousand years.

And that is exactly what is sounding the alarm now. My nervous system switches into survival mode.Any second now they will cast you out. Any second now you will be alone.It screams as if my life were at stake.

That is why shame is not a quiet doubt. It is panic. But there is a difference nobody ever showed me. The one between shame and guilt. Shame says: I am bad. Guilt says: I did that badly.

It sounds like a small thing. But it is everything. Guilt points at an act – and an act I can change, put right, do differently next time. Shame points at me. And I can’t run away from myself.

Guilt gets me moving. Shame paralyses me.

So I translate. As soon as I think “I am”, I turn it into “I have”. I am not a failure – I have lost my job. That is not splitting hairs. That is a completely different place to stand.

Because “I am a failure” is a verdict on my whole life. “I have lost my job” is only a situation. And a situation I can tackle.

And that harsh sentence – is it even true? Or is it just an old sentence I decided to believe a long time ago? An old decision, not a verdict from on high. And what I once decided, I can decide again.

For years my head only collected evidence that I am a failure. Now I collect the evidence against it. So I take my DoD. On the left I write my verdict: I am a failure. On the right, the evidence against it.

The crisis three years ago. Everyone loses their head. I hold the department together. My son on his bike for the first time. One afternoon, and he had the hang of it. Me next to him, out of breath, proud. My father never practised anything with me.

Twelve years ago I stood in front of nothing once before. Worked my way back up. Step by step. My wife has stood by me for fifteen years. Together we will manage it.

And that is supposed to be a failure? The evidence was always there. I simply didn’t want to see it. The longer the right-hand column gets, the quieter the sentence on the left becomes. Until it dissolves.

But the strongest part is still to come. Because shame lives on hiding. In the dark it grows. Say it out loud and it shrinks. So I get out of the car. I go in. My heart is hammering as if I were going into battle.

My wife looks up. “What’s wrong?” And I say it. Haltingly, my voice breaking: “I’ve lost my job. Today.”

There it is, the moment I was so afraid of. Any second now she will see that I have failed. Any second now she will turn away.

She doesn’t turn away. She asks. What happened? Why you? What happens now? Her forehead is creased with worry, she is doing sums in her head, I can hear the tension in her voice.

But she stays. We talk for a long time. At some point she says: “We’ll sort this out. We always have.” That is why I love her. That is what a real partnership is. I will give everything for that – and find a better job.

No magic words make the worry go away. Money is still tight. But I am not alone with it any more. And the shame that stopped me breathing in the car has got smaller. Simply because I said it out loud.

Something strikes me. My wife didn’t use the word once. Failure. She didn’t even think it. Only I say it. Over and over. I speak to nobody as harshly as I speak to myself.

To a friend who lost his job today I would never say: you failure. I would say: that is rough, you will get back on your feet, I am here.

Why don’t I grant myself what I give everyone else? From today I talk to myself the way she talks to me. The way you talk to somebody you love.

It depends on how solid the ground under me is. My self-worth. If it is solid, the shame bounces off. If it is thin, the shame breaks through.

My ground was thin early on. As a child I heard: you are not good enough. Not like that. Try harder. My worth was never simply there. I had to earn it.

So I earned it. With good marks, with performance, with a job, a salary, a title. I stood on what I achieved. On what other people could see.

But that is not solid ground. That is a thin blanket over a hole. Pull the job away and I fall straight through. If I build my self-worth on achievement, every defeat brings me down.

But worth isn’t something you earn at all. A newborn child has achieved nothing – and is infinitely precious. Worth is not a reward. It is simply there. I am worth something. Not for anything. Just because. Today as well. Job or no job.

The shame will come back. At the next mistake, the next defeat, the next sideways look. It is part of life.

But it doesn’t knock me over any more. I know now what it is. Not a verdict on me – only an old alarm going off.

And I know what helps. I turn “I am” into “I have”. I collect the evidence against it in my DoD. I say it out loud. I am good to myself.

As long as I was afraid of embarrassing myself, I could never show myself. I stayed behind the armour. Anyone afraid of other people’s judgement stays invisible.

That fear gets smaller. And with it the armour falls. For the first time I can show myself. With mistakes. With defeats. With everything.

For a long time I lived for the applause. For other people nodding. For looking good. That is exactly what kept me small.

I go into the arena anyway. Not for the applause. But because it is mine. Because I want to. Because I have the courage for it. A few hours ago I was still sitting in the car. Frozen. Unable to walk through my own door.

Now I am inside. With my family. The job is gone, the worry is here. But the shame doesn’t have me any more. I am good enough. Not because somebody confirms it. But because I am.

My Light:

Spot 1 I break open my armour

Spot 2 I am not my mistakes

Spot 3 I am enough

Spot 4 I let you get close to me

Spot 5 I heal my inner child

Spot 6 I belong