You spent a lifetime becoming someone. Now comes the harder work.
The dinner had reached the part where everyone says what they do.
I had my line ready. I always have my line ready. Author, coach, forty-three years in higher education, board president. The small inventory of credentials I keep polished, like good silver in a drawer.
When my turn came, I delivered it. Faces nodded in the polite way strangers nod when they hear that kind of list. Someone said, "Wow, you've been busy." I made a small joke about not knowing how to retire properly.
The conversation moved on without me.
And in the gap between the laughter and the next person's turn, I had the thought I have not been able to put down since.
Not one of those things is me. They are all things I built, so I would not have to be me.
The Wallpaper Has Been Peeling the Whole Time
I went home that night and sat on the deck in the dark.
I did not feel sad. I felt the way you feel when you walk into a room you've lived in for forty years and finally notice the wallpaper has been peeling the entire time.
I am sixty-something years old. I have spent every one of those years becoming someone.
That is not a complaint. Becoming someone is what we are told to do, and I was good at it. I was the first in my family to do a number of things. I collected the degrees, the positions, and the recognitions. I learned how to walk into a room as a somebody.
And here is the part nobody warns you about: it works.
The titles open doors. The credentials confer a kind of safety. People take your call. People save you a seat. The world organizes itself, ever so slightly, around the shape of who you have made yourself into.
What nobody tells you is that the shape eventually becomes the cage.
The Someone in the Shower
I noticed it first in small ways.
I would catch myself, in conversation, pulling out a credential I didn't need to win an argument that didn't matter. I would feel a flicker of something, disappointment maybe, when someone introduced me without my full title. I would rehearse small biographies of myself in the shower.
And underneath all of it, a quieter thing.
I had not, in any honest sense, been alone with myself in a very long time. Whenever I sat down in the silence, the someone I had built would start talking. He had things to do. He had a reputation to maintain. He had a brand. He could not be still, because if he were still, he might not be there at all.
That was the thought. He might not be there at all.
What It Actually Cost Me
I want to tell you what becoming someone actually cost me. Not in the abstract. Specifically.
A few years ago, my daughter called me one afternoon. She was crying. Something had happened, the kind of thing that takes a piece out of you, and she needed her father.
I was between meetings.
I told her I would call her back that evening. I meant it. I was not a bad father. I was an efficient one. I had a window at 7:15 p.m. blocked on my calendar, and I would call her then, be present, and it would be enough.
By 7:15, she had already talked to her sister. She had already cried it out. She had already, in some quiet way I will spend the rest of my life trying to understand, learned not to call me first.
I was not absent that day. I was busy being someone. Someone had a calendar. Someone had a window. Someone could not, in that moment, just be her father.
I have built a lot of things in sixty years. That phone call is the one I cannot unbuild.
The Experiment We Are All Running
I think a lot of us are running this same experiment.
The high-performers. The late-career strivers. The people who have spent decades making themselves into a recognizable thing.
We are testing whether enough achievement, enough recognition, enough being someone, will finally produce the feeling of solid ground we have been chasing since we were nineteen years old.
It does not.
I am sorry to be the one to say it. I waited a long time to find out.
The achievements are real. The work mattered. I am not here to tell you that any of it was wasted. That would be its own dishonesty, and I have no patience left for dishonesty.
The careers we build are not lies. The credentials are nothing. They feed our families. They put us in rooms where we can do really well.
The problem is that somewhere along the way, we mistook the scaffolding for the building.
We started believing the résumé was the man. That the title was the soul. That if we could just become enough of someone, the loneliness underneath would finally close up like a wound healing.
It does not close. Someone is not the wound's healer. The bandage is something we have been changing every few years for our entire adult lives.
The Wind Has No Résumé
What I am trying now, at sixty-something, is harder than anything I did in the becoming years.
I am trying to be no one.
Not no one as in nothing. Not as in disappearing, giving up, or pretending the work didn't happen. I'm too old to play at false humility. That is just another performance.
I mean, no one in the sense the desert teaches you, when you sit on a porch in Arizona long enough, and the wind moves through the brush, and you realize the wind has no résumé. The wind is just the wind. It does not introduce itself.
I am trying to walk into a room without my titles walking in three steps ahead of me.
I am trying to have a conversation where I do not, at any point, mention what I have done.
I am trying to answer the phone when my daughter calls. Not at 7:15. Not in the window. Not as the someone with the calendar. Just as her father. Whoever that is. Whoever is left when I stop introducing him.
Taking the Wall Down
It is harder than weightlifting. It is harder than any deadline I have ever met.
The someone I built has spent six decades becoming load-bearing. He does not want to step aside. He believes, and he is not entirely wrong, that without him the whole structure might come down.
But I am beginning to suspect that what comes down, when he steps aside, is not me.
It is the wall I built around me, brick by brick, every time I introduced myself by my accomplishments and felt the small relief of being known.
What is behind the wall, I do not yet know. That's the honest part. I am not writing this from the other side of some clean awakening.
I am writing it from inside the slow, uncomfortable work of taking the wall down. One brick, one phone call, one quiet morning at a time.
If You Have Been Becoming Someone Too
If you are reading this and you are also someone who has spent decades becoming, I want to say something to you that I wish someone had said to me at forty.
The person you have built is not your enemy. He served you. She got you here. Honor that. Take the silver out of the drawer and use it.
But do not mistake what you have built for who you are.
The doing is not the being. Someone is not the soul. And there is a person in there, quieter, smaller, less impressive, who has been waiting your entire adult life for you to stop performing long enough to meet him.
He is not going to call out to you. He has been crowded out for too long. He has learned not to call first.
You are going to have to be the one who calls.
The Man on the Porch
I am still working on it. I will probably be working on it for the rest of my life.
But sometimes now, on my deck, in the early light, in the gaps between the doing, I notice there is a man here who does not need a title to take up his own space.
He has been here the whole time.
I was just too busy becoming someone to sit down beside him.
He is seventy-two years old. He has been waiting a long time.
I don't want to make him wait.