How My Coping Mechanism Accidentally Became My Reason To Live
…and what happened when it stopped working
According to the UK government’s website — which offers many such helpful pieces of information — I have just about exactly ten years until I reach pensionable age. There’s no compulsion to actually retire at that age any more, and with the way things are looking — both with the economy and with the increasingly fragile state of the benefits system — I don’t imagine that there will ever be such a compulsion ever again. Instead, people are going to have to work until they cannot work any longer, and in many ways that’s probably what I would have hoped for. Not that it matters so much anyway. I don’t live in the UK any more and doubt I will again.
It’s interesting to read the way the concept of a career is fading in the eyes of the next generation of young workers, more attracted to the idea of a series of work modes — perhaps having as many as three different eras of effort, each with a different set of skills — or ignoring the concept of career altogether, and simply doing whatever feels meaningful at each stage of your life to put bread on the table. I think I would have liked to live with that goal in mind, instead of finding myself panicking at the idea that I could fall off of the path I’ve spent my life attempting to maintain.
Career was always somehow hardwired into my thinking. Work — in fact — became one of the most important components of my general coping mechanism, although it took me a very long time to realise that was what I was doing.
Nobody in my family went to University. The thought of such a thing was utterly beyond all comprehension. It wasn’t for the likes of us — working class. Grown up in the North of England. Thick, because that was what everything I experienced seemed to be telling me I was. I have no recollection of anyone at school even mentioning the possibility of third level education to me — not that I would have made it through the entrance requirements, or so I imagined.
Secondary school — middle school, for those across the pond — terrified me.
My prepubescent elementary years hadn’t been all that hard to navigate as an ongoing victim of sexual abuse. Being at school became a sort of refuge, in fact. Children didn’t get into conversations about sex at that age, so avoiding the topic and faking innocence didn’t present a challenge. If anyone did stray into that territory, I would clam up instinctively, fein deafness and run away from the danger zone. With the move to middle school and its hordes of hormonal youngsters, that crude defencive stance just made me a target to be labelled and isolated. A poof. A homo. Irony of ironies, if anyone were to know what I’d done…
Instead, I kept people at a respectable arm’s length and avoided making close friendships that might encourage intimate or revealing conversations. And I stayed that way. Of course I didn’t have any girlfriends. I was nearly thirty by the time I had sex with somebody other than my abuser.
I didn’t do great at school — a chronic underachiever, too busy living in my own world and working on my powers of invisibility — not realising at the time that the skillset I was developing in hobby space would serve me so well in the workplace.
With the early 80s recession pulverising the economy and decimating the job market in the part of England where I lived, options of an apprenticeship evaporated and I was left with the simple to make but somewhat unexpected choices of unemployment or college, and it was there that I discovered that the hobbies and pastimes that had been my refuge actually had some marketable value. I’d taught myself to code. I’d become adept at putting little electronic circuit boards together — messily, and sometimes resulting in small clouds of pungent smoke when I got the maths wrong. These things were the worthless stumblings of a kid playing with Lego in my eyes at the time, but apparently not when I sat entrance exams for college.
By then, the armor plated persona I would spend my life perfecting was roughly assembled and was falling into place about me. Of course, it was far from perfect, and I continued to seek out isolation, avoiding opportunities for the past to be uncovered and the sources of my deeply ingrained shame to be revealed. Who would have thought that it was just those sorts of insular detachment and lack of social skill that would become synonymous with the way of life of the tech industry. I would fit right in.
But all of that — the social detachment, the solitude, the weirdness — it became me, and I wore it well. My ability to read people and their emotions in order to fit in, to disappear, to please became reflex actions that steered me away from situations I thought might become threatening, and in time, with practice, I developed the ability to display parodies of emotion that were convincing enough to the outside world that the armor plated version of me became what everyone assumed was actually me.
And it actually afforded me a certain amount of success. I became known as somebody who got things done. My work ethic was impeccable, uncompromising and utterly selfless, putting work in front of everything else in order to do what I had always felt compelled to do because it brought praise, attention and what I had assumed must have been love, from those I sought to serve.
Then came the first of the speed bumps.
By now I was over twenty years into my second dysfunctional marriage and had a teenage child. The business I’d thrown my heart and soul into for over a decade collapsed. I’d passed my fiftieth birthday by then and my business role had morphed into a weird combination of things covering consulting and solutions architecting, with a fair bit of business development and sales thrown in, but a long way from my earlier years of pure technology, and those skills lay seized up and rusted by the wayside, at least twenty years out of date. Constantly pandering to my inherent need to make people around me happy, I had utterly neglected every bit of the self development and skills maintenance mantra I routinely fed others around me, and found myself struggling to see what career choices remained open, short of flipping burgers or collecting carts in the shopping mall car park.
With no opportunities to run around pleasing people available, my self worth was in the toilet, and I became overwhelmed by debilitating depression, for the first time truly considering the ultimate option of ending the torment for good.
…and then speed bump number two.
In a fit of desperation, I decided to do something I’d never managed to do throughout my whole life. I talked to somebody. Honestly. Openly. I told them everything. All the things from before the armor plating was there. All the things that made me. Showed them the terrified little boy who still waited in the darkness, wondering what would happen if somebody ever managed to find him.
That was almost five years ago now.
I live on the opposite side of the planet in a new relationship with somebody who knows everything and accepts it all. My job has changed, and while I still struggle to shake my desire to please, the fear of losing the path again has subsided a great deal.
The relationship I have with my daughter is not what I would want it to be, but she is young and I am patient. If there is anything about where I am right now that I would change it is that relationship, but I know that if I had not made the choices I made and taken the steps that came after there is a good chance I would not be in a place to be able to write this now.
I continue to hope that she’ll come to understand and accept that one day.
Acceptance and belief open the doors to survival, and maybe even to healing. One day.
I don’t believe that any victim of child sexual abuse comes away from the experience undamaged, and many find the whole of their lives shaped by the things that happened to them without ever speaking about it. Please reach out to somebody. Nobody can simply make it better or make it not have happened, but your truth is your truth, and there are people who will believe and will no judge.
I promise.
