Doing Is Being

“People’s actions are motivated by their needs. When we discover our needs, we discover who we are.” Dr. Lance Sweets–Bones, Season 3, Episode 14, “The Wannabe in the Weeds.”

I have been watching the TV show Bones during my morning workouts, and this line really resonated with me in my current journey to figure my mess out. So what is it that I need? I know it isn’t that simple, that figuring out what I need will give me all the answers to who I am, who I am becoming, what I need in order to be happier and healthier, etc. But it has to be a good place to start. If you know what you’re seeking, it has to be a lot easier to find. 

Most kids have many different dreams about what they will do when they grow up. At age five, my stepdaughter decided she was going to be a ballerina princess ninja. At age 10, I decided what I wanted to do in life: matter. (I know this for fact, because of a dated entry in one of my thirty half-filled journals and notebooks from my childhood.) Not a specific job or even area of interest; I simply wanted to matter. I’m not entirely sure I was conscious of why, at the time, but I know very clearly now: I felt that I did not matter. What I thought, what I said, what I did, none of it mattered. So that’s what I wanted in life, more than anything else. To matter. And that never changed as I got older.

You see, my father was the type who didn’t want his children heard or seen, unless they could be shown off to an appreciative audience, unless they could be useful. The rest of the time, we needed to be invisible. And silent. Totally silent. We were supposed to be silent and well-behaved, offer an amusing anecdote or two in front of their dinner guests, then melt into the background and put ourselves to bed. For example, I remember that my parents hated Bill Clinton when he was president of the United States. I didn’t know anything about politics, but when one of my dad’s guests pointed out that Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar, I made the sarcastic comment, “What, they didn’t have anyone else to choose from that year?” I had no idea what I was saying; I must have heard it somewhere else (likely the Conservative talk radio shows my parents listened to back then), but everyone laughed and said how clever I was. He beamed and squeezed my shoulder. 

Hell, my dad still tells the story of how I created a portmanteau, combining the words “tourist” and “moron” into “touron,” to describe the rude and inconsiderate tourists we sometimes encountered while living on the Oregon Coast. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I had read it in a book the week before; he bragged to everyone about how clever I was. I’m not joking; 30 years later, he still tells that story. There’s no way I could tell him the truth now. It was one of the only times I was visible back then. And maybe now. 

So I wanted to matter. Needed to matter. No idea how to accomplish it, but I knew it was something I needed. 

About a year later, at age 11, I got my first opportunity to feel what it was like to be important, to matter. 

My mother kept several horses at a boarding stable near the beach on the coast of Oregon, and sometimes my parents would go riding together and leave us at home. One afternoon, they came home hours later than expected (long before the days of cell phones), so I ran out to the driveway, angry and indignant. I was supposed to go to a friend’s house, and I needed a ride. But my mother didn’t get out of the car right away.

Her horse had spooked and bolted, bucking as he ran. She was thrown off and landed on her shoulder in the sand, badly breaking her right collar bone, dislocating her shoulder, and tearing every imaginable tendon and ligament. She was in agony, even after the hospital and a full round of powerful pain medication.

My life completely changed that day, though it was a long time before we knew just how much (more on that later, I’m sure).

My brother and I were homeschooled, so we were home all the time, making it an easy transition that way. But we had no family within a thousand miles, my parents didn’t have close friends there, and my dad had to go to work the very next day.

I became the parent.

She lived in the recliner in the living room for the next six weeks, with me her almost constant companion, bringing everything she needed, helping her to the bathroom and even helping her to bathe, managing her pain medication, keeping her company, and trying to keep her as comfortable as possible. The worst part was seeing her in so much pain and so angry at being so helpless.

But that wasn’t all. I planned and cooked every meal after that first night, my father taking me to the grocery store late at night after he came home from work, me sleepily clutching my painstakingly written shopping list. I did all the laundry and learned how to iron my father’s work shirts (and even managed not to burn any). Pretty much everything that wasn’t mowing the lawn. House cleaning, appointment tracking, pet care,  preparing and grading the weekly lessons for me and my brother, even writing checks for my father to sign so I could put them in the mail to pay our bills. Yep, I learned how to balance a checkbook at age 11. 

A few weeks in, he brought my mother a dozen red roses. He brought me three yellow and pink roses. The only flowers he ever gave me. And he thanked me. I felt so grown up. I was so important, so essential, so seen. I mattered. 

I was doomed from that moment. 

I don’t know when I first became conscious of this, but from that day on, I equated doing with having value, with mattering. It is a scary thing to believe that you have no intrinsic value, that if you are not actively doing, you do not matter, you are not important, you do not deserve good in your life. 

This belief means, among other things, that I cannot rest without feeling extremely anxious, especially if there are people around who might see me “being lazy.” If I am completely alone, I can sometimes manage to relax for short periods of time without panicking (though I always feel guilty after), but if anyone is nearby, I simply cannot. And something as simple as someone declining my offer of help can send me into a panic, this tight terrified flutter in my chest, clawing its way up my neck, crawling blackness into my peripheral vision. Because someone politely said, “No.” 

No.

And my world comes crashing down. 

Such a simple word: no. 

No meaning. No purpose. No value. No need for me to exist. 

And as with many errors in my thinking, I don’t know how to fix it. I can remind myself that I deserve to relax, to take a break, to take a nap. Doesn’t help. I can tell myself a hundred times a day that I have value anyway, that I am important simply because I exist. And I am working very hard to communicate this to my daughter. But I still don’t actually believe it, at least not for myself. 

How do you untrain thirty years of faulty thinking? My entire self-concept is based on this premise:

1. I need to matter.

2. I only matter if I am doing.

Therefore,

3. I have to “do” in order to “be.”

So what the hell do I do with that?