The changes that are good.

Many of us are controlled, knowingly or not, by assumptions. I think the biggest problem I ever had was that I came to assume I had no right to anything better than wherever I was at that particular moment.


When a lot of the voices you hear throughout much of your life tell you how second rate and contemptible you are (school and university, for instance), eventually you begin to take them seriously. And when the voice telling you those things is your own, it creates a self-sustaining demon. Because you accept as an article of faith that "something better" is not something you're entitled to, every experience you have tends to confirm this belief: it being the natural lot of humanity that many of our experiences are negative ones, you feel that you had them coming to you; should something good happen in your life, you automatically assume it was a fluke or a mistake. 


All of your actions tend to validate this state of mind: because you assume you don't deserve to do other than fail, you learn to tolerate and make the best of crummy things, not because you're a simple man and like them, but because you can never persuade yourself that there's an alternative.


How does this work in practice?  In my case, I assumed (for example) that I wasn't someone who would or could live somewhere good. That such a thing could be my life simply did. not. enter. my. head. This is why I voluntarily lived for several years in a small, fairly dingy flat. I assumed I couldn't have a good car, or aspire to own one that wasn't a pile of junk, and so I persisted in owning, one after another, a second hand Laser and then a Corolla, one of which had a slowly dying engine and the other of which was slowly morphing into the world's fastest pile of rust. It never occurred to me I could do any better. And it's also why I persisted in sleeping in a single bed despite something larger being well within my purchasing power.


I was marginally more sophisticated with work. I'd never done especially well at law school and only landed a job through personal connections. I always simply assumed that I would fail if I went to a bigger firm or a better job, and so I stayed in a poorly paid role that I found largely unsatisfying and which in the end drained my will to live, until an encounter with a very energetic recruiter resulted in a hiring process that took on a life of its own. I'd been to job interviews before then, sure, but I think potential employers can tell when you don't think you deserve the job: if you don't think you're a serious candidate for a role, there's no reason for them to think differently. This was something that I think my wife found incomprehensible and exasperating by turns: she would tell me I was a good and talented lawyer, and I could do better, and I'd either leave her feeling like she was talking to a brick wall or have a scrolling list of reasons why I would move but not yet.  This was, as it happens, the first issue which brought out how difficult my sometime issues were for her.  I'd been to a disastrous job interview on the Wednesday before Easter in 2009, and was pretty upset about it when we went to Lorne for the Easter weekend.  We had quite an intense conversation about it one morning on that trip.


Inevitably this belief made things bad romantically as well. Before my wife, I never thought I was the sort of guy who "deserved" (in the sense of, had a chance with) any girl, and so I either didn't try or tried in the most lame and half-hearted ways. I don't in any respect regret meeting, marrying and building a life with my wife, but I can understand why sometimes she must have wondered what was in my head. How can you believe you're the most important thing to your husband when all his life he's settled for anything he could find?


This is why I failed to cope when our girls were born. When the hard work began, of paying for it all and being an active and involved parent, being and achieving "better" (financially, time wise, personal attitude) stopped being (for want of a better word) optional and became vital. And because I'd spent forever convinced I could never achieve anything "better" for myself or anyone else, I didn't achieve it, and increasingly I unravelled at the gap between what was needed and what I could produce. That this same gap between what I considered myself capable of being and what I needed to be lead me to disaster at the old new job: while there were other factors, a near-complete lack of belief that I could be better in the way that I wanted to be was a big nail in the coffin.


This was, intriguingly, something I mentioned to the psychologist who my wife and I saw for marriage counselling, when I talked about being afraid to ask for things at the old old job despite my boss' approval being more or less guaranteed. I didn't recognise it then but this belief was clearly what I was referring to.


Something changed about me where this belief is concerned this year. I'm not sure when it happened. Maybe when I started writing more. Certainly when I began the new job. And maybe (I know this will sound weird) when I started updating my LinkedIn profile, which is kind of like getting a huge high-five from yourself as you realise you're a better and more competent person than you thought you were, and that even what sounds like a boast isn't a boast when you can reliably back it up. For the first time that I can remember, "better" in my life feels like it's there for the taking. I don't think I've changed exactly, and I'm sure the world hasn't changed. But one thing has changed. I guess it's that I'm not afraid of everything any more.

The other thing that has changed is that for the first time that I can remember, I feel comfortable inside my own skin. Yeah, I know, it's a cliché, but it's the truth. I'm not perfect - I could have been a better husband, but I think I was as good as I could have been. I'm not in a position to be the father I thought I would be, but I can still be a pretty good one if I try.  And yeah, I'm a bundle of apparently mismatched pieces - the intuitive historian in the highly non-intuitive legal profession. Someone who loves American football and pre-Reformation music. I could pull apart and put back together a Ronaldson-Tippett engine given sufficient time, tools and unlimited amounts of WD-40, but also discovered on reading the shoe-heavy post of another blogger that I had an opinion about them (for the avoidance of doubt, I didn't want to be wearing them, but I did think they looked great). I'm good with going to the National Gallery, and also with going to watch the judging of Maine-Anjou cattle.


What I've come to realise is that all these pieces don't have to fit together in any particular way, and certainly not in a way to forces them to be seamless. If you relax and stop trying to force the different parts of who you are to fit together, they'll just settle down together in a way which you can intuit, if not actually understand or explain.  You'll really only come to grief if you do try and force them to fit together, because inevitably you'll find you're denying part of your own nature.  There's nothing wrong with bringing one of these pieces to the fore at a right moment and letting the rest slip into the background (one would not, for example, get into a deep discussion of the economic roots of the English Renaissance at the Pakenham stockyards), because that's the essence of being a whole person.  The word person, it's worth remembering, comes from the Etruscan word phersu, meaning 'mask'.  Everybody presents different masks (or sides of their identity) depending on the surroundings.  The only people who are completely consistent in the face they show the world are those with just one side to their identity.  Someone like that can only be a dreadful bore at best and a madman at worst.


I should add that this is something I'd never have figured out for myself without the help of a lot of truly awesome ladies (yes, all girls) who've been supporting me on the bumpy road that 2012 has been. Most of you read this blog, so take a bow JF, HD, KT, GD and SL. Thanks to you I can fist bump Popeye and say calmly "I yam what I yam!"

This year, as I said, has been a hell of a bumpy ride, and of course, there's a lot of things in it that I wish had gone differently. But then again, looking purely at what has come out of it for me, and the person it's let me become, I find it hard to regret it. As the sages who wrote Red Dwarf pointed out: "If you're gonna eat tuna, expect bones".


It seems strange to say it after a year in which I haven't held my beloved daughters for 12 months, and in which my marriage has run aground, I've been fired, had a full-fledged meltdown in front of one boss, spent countless evenings at the office and spent a fair bit of time  in some pretty dark places, but looking at all that has happened, and all that the future might hold, I feel like I'm probably the most blessed man who ever drew breath.

Tomorrow will be another beautiful day.