02 My Light – Spot 3
Expectations: I am enough!
I have learned to recognise my shame. I can show myself, piece by piece. That is a lot.
But I don’t live on a desert island. All around me, day and night, a machine is running that whispers: you are not enough. You don’t have enough. Look how wonderful everyone else is.
And depending on how solid my ground is, I withstand it – or I fall. How does this mechanism work?
Evening on the sofa. A series is on. Beautiful people, quick-witted, well dressed. Every problem solved in forty-five minutes. At the end they all fall into each other’s arms.
The phone on the side. I scroll. My colleague’s holiday, the new house, the six-pack, the happy family at Sunday brunch. Everyone laughing. Everyone doing fine.
And me? Sitting here in my tracksuit bottoms. Dishwasher full, back wrecked, bank account tight. Same again tomorrow.
Something tightens inside me. A quiet, nasty thought: everyone else has got it sorted. Just not me. Everyone else is living the right life. Just not me. But hold on. What am I actually comparing here?
I am seeing their outside. The one moment they selected. The best photo out of three hundred. The six-pack in the right light. The holiday – not the row at the airport beforehand.
And I hold that up against my inside. Against my tiredness, my worries, my perfectly ordinary grey Tuesday. My behind-the-scenes against their glossy show.
I can’t win this game. It is rigged. Nobody posts full laundry baskets, the doubts, the sleepless night with a head full of worries.
I am comparing myself to a facade. And feeling bad because my real life doesn’t look like their advert. And that feeling doesn’t stop at the phone. It runs right through my day.
I wake up and I am already thinking: not enough sleep, too much to do. I fall into bed in the evening thinking: not enough done. Didn’t tidy up, didn’t ring back, didn’t exercise, put off the thing closest to my heart again.
Whatever I do – it is never enough. I am never enough. Even the past was supposedly better. Everything was simpler then, nicer, more real. Says a voice that is never satisfied.
That is the treadmill. I run and run and never arrive. Because the finish line keeps being moved a little further away.
And every advert, every headline, every perfect picture whispers the same thing: you are missing something. Buy this, be like that, do more. Then you will finally be enough. I will never be enough. That is how the game is built.
To this wound – I am not enough – I react in one of two ways. The first: I withdraw. Make myself small, say nothing, show nothing. Don’t stand out, don’t give them any more to aim at. I disappear.
The second: I turn it up. Post my best photo, drive the big car, show off what I can do and who I know. Look at me, I am doing great, I am missing nothing.
It looks like the opposite. It is the same wound. One man hides his “not enough”. The other one outshines it.
And now the trick I never saw through: the glossy pictures that make me feel so small – many of them are armour themselves. Even the man with the six-pack may be whispering to himself in the evening: not enough.
I compare myself with other people’s masks. And I don’t notice that underneath sits the same shame, the same insecurity as mine.
How do I get out of it? My first reflex: more. Achieve more, own more, show more. Then I will finally be enough. But that is the trap. The opposite of lack is not abundance.
I can pile up as much as I like – it won’t fill my emptiness. The man with the second house wants the third. It is never enough. There is always somebody with more. I can’t buy my way out of lack. I think my way out.
There is only one way out. A single word. Enough. I have enough. I do enough. I am enough.
That doesn’t mean I let myself go and stop striving for anything. Quite the opposite. I carry on working, and I want to do things really well. But for a different reason.
Am I striving for the perfect photo, the post with the most likes? Or am I striving for excellence because I burn for the thing itself?
One of them is looking sideways at the applause. The other I do for myself. Because I believe in it. With my whole heart. In practice three things help me.
First: I stop comparing my inside with other people’s outside. When the sting comes, I pause for a moment and ask: am I looking at a real life – or at a glossy show? Almost always it is the show.
Second: I turn the lack around. Every evening I take my DoD and write down three things that were enough today. A good conversation. A laugh with my son. A meal that filled me up.
At first that feels odd. But slowly my eye learns to see what is full instead of what is missing. What I look for, I find. Look for lack and I find lack. Look for enough and I find enough.
Third: I turn off the tap. The machine only runs if I let it run. I don’t have to scroll through other people’s lives every evening. How to handle media without being eaten by it – chapter 01 “My Journey – Step 5” goes into that in detail.
And above all of it stands a new question. No longer: what do other people expect of me? But: what do I actually want? Until now I always thought that being a man was only about this: be strong. Never show a weakness. Dominate. Win.
But that isn’t true. That is exactly what cuts me off from everyone. Behind the armour nobody can reach me.
In truth the message runs the other way round. Show yourself. Your strengths. Your weaknesses. What you are good at. Only when other people really see me can they take my measure. And let me play.
And slowly my picture of who is actually successful turns round. Not the man with the smoothest profile. The man who dares to be real. With rough edges, with corners, with laundry baskets. Who is attackable and stands in the arena.
Those are the truly successful ones. Not perfect. Human. That is exactly what has kept me small all this time: the fear of not being as good as everyone else. That is my handbrake. With it on, I don’t move an inch.
So I let it off. I don’t compare myself with other people’s advertising any more. I measure myself against what matters to me. I put the phone down. I switch the television off.
In the next room I can hear my son laughing. Not glossy. Real. My life. Right here. I go to him and laugh too. And it is enough. I am enough.
For weeks I have been sitting in the cellar in the evenings. Guitar. I am writing a song. Chord by chord, line by line. Nobody knows about it. Today it is finished. Today I play it to somebody for the first time. To a friend.
My heart is thumping. My finger trembles over the string. Because this is not just a song. This is me. I start to play. And I put something into his hands. Not the guitar. Me.
The song ends. Silence. And in that silence I wait for his verdict as if it were a court judgement. If he says good, I am good. If he says bad, I am bad. I have just handed him the gavel.
Stupid. Because if he doesn’t like it, I only have two lousy options. I am devastated and never touch the guitar again. Or I cut my own work down: it was only knocked together on the side anyway.
There is a third. His criticism hits the song. Not me. Maybe he is even right – then I will do it better next time. Or I play it to somebody else. It was only one opinion. The song is today. I am more than today.
I take the gavel back. In the end only I pass judgement on me. When it comes to making things and criticising them, one thing matters enormously. The timing.
Fresh from finishing, I am high on it. A stroke of genius. Any criticism now cuts like a knife. So I wait. A few days. The high wears off. I see more clearly. I find things to improve myself. Now I can learn from constructive criticism.
The same the other way round. When somebody shows me something, I sense where he is. Is he still glowing? Then I swallow my clever criticism. And share his delight. Criticism can wait. First the question: do you even want to hear it?
With children, by the way, this rule does not apply.
A child doesn’t wait. It comes running. Picture in hand. Eyes full of pride. Exactly like me back then. If I say “why is your sun purple?” now, something breaks. Quietly. So I keep my mouth shut. And I share the joy. “Wow. Did you make that?”
The sun is allowed to be purple.
At the weekend I put a shelf unit together. “I’ll manage that easily on my own.” The shelf wobbles. The instructions? Thrown away long ago. Little screws lying about, and I have no idea where they go. Do I ask anyone? Never. I’m not useless.
Three hours later something lopsided is standing there. Five minutes of help would have done it. Asking for help? It feels like giving up. Like weakness. As a man especially. A real bloke does it on his own.
That is exactly what keeps me small. And lonely. When in fact it works the other way round. The people I admire ask the most questions. “Don’t know. Will you show me?”
The best salesman I know says calmly: “Good question. I’ll look into it.” And closes more deals than all the know-alls put together. Nobody buys from a smart alec. We buy from people.
Asking shows who you are. And that is exactly what connects.
One layer deeper it gets uncomfortable. If I can only accept help with a knot in my stomach, then I don’t give from the heart either, without an ulterior motive. I invite somebody – and secretly keep score. “Didn’t even say thank you. I’m not inviting him again.”
That is not giving. That is a trade.
So I let go of both. I ask when I am stuck. I accept without going red. I give without opening an account. And that is exactly where people start to like me.