Bubbles popping

This isn’t about champagne.

For the better part of the last two decades, I’ve lived my life in a series of bubbles.  Different parts of my life simply did not intersect, and that put me in a position of living in what were essentially different and isolated worlds.  For example, when I was married, there was work.  My ex-wife wasn’t really a finance person – she got along quite well with my coworkers, mind you, but as a companion in navigating my career, the interest really wasn’t there except insofar as it impacted our collective life together when job moves and relocations were involved.  Don’t get me wrong, she supported me – but in the sense of understanding what I was dealing with when the Seattle bank blew up, or during my time in New York in an investment bank, or why I wanted to make any of the career shifts I felt so compelled to make over the course of fifteen years, she listened politely but didn’t have any reference points or perspective to see inside my journey.

On a much more challenging note, my spouse and my family (parents and sister) didn’t really get along – which meant that to continue to have a close relationship with my parents, I needed to do it in essence behind her back.  My parents resented that, and so did my spouse, and among many things that led to the marriage not working, this core inability for those two “bubbles” – my marriage and the family that raised me – to get along was probably going to sink one or both bubbles no matter what at some point.  And sure enough, eventually my marriage failed – not exclusively because of that bubble issue with my family but certainly it was a contributing factor.

With a more recent partner, there was a similar problem, the bubble of my son.  My son comes, obviously, with his mother, my ex-wife.  When we first split up, my ex-wife largely viewed my girlfriend as the reason I left her, and had an understandable rage as a result.  That, I think, has largely abated, with much thanks to a great divorce therapist and a lot of work on both sides at listening and building understanding we ironically never had within the bubble of marriage.  But the girlfriend understandably had little desire to engage with a bubble that came with it a person who deeply disliked her.  As a result, I immediately had two bubbles again.  I had my relationship bubble, and I had my co-parenting bubble.

Trying to maintain that in equilibrium has proven to be an impossible challenge, but oddly, one of the reasons it has been so difficult is because of something I learned as a kid, which has served me really well in modern working life but much less so relationship land.  It has to do with the skills you learn while you create your own bubble – you know, the one we call our identity, the one that defines us as adult human beings.

Apropos of all this, I watched I, Tonya over the weekend.  Tonya Harding is presented in the film as almost the inevitable end product of a family and cultural environment in which violence and narcissistic control were the norm.  There is almost nothing in common between the environment that raised me and the environment portrayed in the film (except time overlap: Harding is only about four years older than I am, which made the cultural references devastatingly familiar), but the idea of being shaped by the process of forming your own identity in the shadow of one’s parents caught my attention.

My parents did not hit one another or my sister or I.  They did not swear regularly and chain smoke.  They loved us dearly and wanted desperately for us both to be happy and good, and also they desired for us to be “successful.”  Informed by solid middle class Catholic values, none of this was particularly awkward for me or, truly, for my sister, mostly.  What was challenging was their willingness to judge us as people.  When I got caught sneaking beer to the basement when I was 14, for example, it wasn’t just that I was punished with being grounded; I had a lecture on how I was failing as a human being.  When I was brought home by Officer Williams after doing 75mph in a 30mph zone, without a license, in a friend’s car, sure, I got yelled at by my dad – but in the background my mom cried into a Kleenex while muttering how she couldn’t believe I had turned out this way.  I’m not excusing my behavior, mind you – I mean, it was stupid beyond measure, and I deserved to be punished beyond the simple fine from the police.  But my parents were masters of having me experience the sense that I had failed, utterly, as a human being – not just in the act, but in my very existence as a human being.

It was powerful theater – it makes for great stories when I tell people about growing up as the son of a Catholic priest and an ex-nun – but I’ve come to realize in raising my own son how terrifying that is, and how unnecessary it is.  But it’s inside me – that memory is burned into the core of me.

When I was a teenager, to avoid this kind of existential judgment, I got insanely good at managing the bubbles of my life.  Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t running a numbers racket on the side or anything, but having any sense of a zone of my own required what felt like constant subterfuge.  I became an early master of spin but what I was really doing was creating a bubble, a bubble for my own identity to live without the fear of judgment.  I never lost the fear – indeed, preserving the bubble was tiring and probably served to magnify the fear more than anything else – but I did learn to create a world away from my parents’ ceaselessly judging eyes.

I learned a number of dubious skills along the way.  First, I learned how to both obtain more information than others thought I should have, and learned to manage my own dissemination of information to constantly try to maintain an information edge.  With my parents, this came down to observing them closely and learning their habits and patterns – and occasionally reading the mail that piled up on the desk in the kitchen to know whether financial pressures were raising tensions, or what purchases were being made on the credit cards.  I also learned to discern closely what information was “good” and what was “bad” – bad being anything that would bring down a judgmental observation on me, good being that which would alleviate concerns and make them happy that I was being good, being happy, and beings successful – and thus give me more space to be outside of their sight.  Sometimes I got caught out in managing all of this, but that just taught me to get better at it.

I didn’t lie – or at least not that much, certainly nothing significant that I recall and I have a long memory for shame – because lies were both too difficult to manage and remember, and because if I got caught on a lie, I would really get the judgment poured down on me.  There was too much risk in it – much better to just manage facts.  If facts which had been left out later came to light, I could usually manage it as it would occur well after any potentially suspect act.  And given that I never had all the facts anyway, it was usually plausible that I had just been a clueless clod at some point.  In fact, I often was – which also was a feedback loop to show me I needed to be better about getting information up front.  Anyway, no one really judges you for appearing to be in ignorance of something, even if you actually were aware of it but chose not to bring it to light.

None of this was particularly moral, mind you.  But it worked in creating not just safe zones to smoke cigarettes outside Denny’s at three in the morning.  It also helped me create my “identity” as an adult.  And it kept me safe from being judged as I experimented with what being an adult really meant.

That helped a lot when I went to university and then to the workforce – especially in the workforce.  I came to realize most of corporate life is about managing information, and most information management is done for incredibly venal, greedy reasons.  The reasons bothered me, but the technique didn’t – I was already accomplished at that – and as I navigated various large financial institutions, I actually was able to get good things done.  Things didn’t always work out, but generally they did, and I found that having those skills and the willingness and ability to creatively control information, paired with a desire to simply do right by others, was actually a powerful combination.

It did not help me in my relationships.

Relationships require two things: honesty and forgiveness.  Good relationships require you to be radically honest and radically forgiving.  I’m good at forgiveness.  The pain of feeling your value as a person being judged was too great as a kid, and that – plus a good dose of listening to the actual words of Christ in church and not taking the canonical judgments offered by Catholicism at face value – has given me strength to forgive and get better at it over time.  That doesn’t mean I don’t judge before forgiving – I’m human, we judge – and sometimes I rage and it takes awhile to find the words to let go and offer up atonement and accept apology, but I think I’ve put the days of being a complete judgmental asshole behind me.

I’m not, however, radically honest – I retain even in my intimate relationships a tendency to manage information.  When I’ve been caught, my partner at the time has rightly accused me of dishonesty – or some similar form of the same word – and over time, trust was eroded.  The bubble I create around myself through this information management becomes a kind of wall, to use a word one of my partners has used to describe her own process of doing the same thing.

The odd thing is that, being so good at creating that bubble, I can recognize it in others.  And being aware of the fact that it’s an awful, isolating feeling to be behind that shell, I’ve tried to encourage nearly everyone – friends, partners, family – to not live inside it, without addressing the hypocrisy of actively living behind one myself.

I don’t do this as much as I used to, though, because of what I learned through the divorce process.  Oddly, it’s made it harder to be successful in business – radical honesty really isn’t desired by other executives and, in my experience, even boards of directors of large public companies prefer to be insulated from information most of the time.  But I still do it, and what I’ve come to realize is that I fall back on this “skill” when I’m sensing that I’ll be judged.  Divorce, moreover, has created a whole host of new situations where I get to be judged by others and found wanting, and the people willing to extend judgment has expanded exponentially.

Case in point: I recently reconnected with an old friend of mine in San Francisco who I had a brief fling with twenty years ago.  She’s now married with two kids, all domestic bliss with a great career – she was worried that it would never happen when we were together way back when – and she was interested in hearing what I was doing.  I told her the full story, and was greeted with what I can only describe as condemnation for not living near my son, and for not trying harder to keep my marriage together “for his sake.”

With an old friend on email, I can simply choose to limit the conversation or not reply.  With a relationship – family, partner – you can’t.  The judgment will come – sometimes explicitly (“how could you even think of that?” someone will say) and sometimes implicitly (we shall not speak of this ever – and you can interpret for yourself what I think of you as a result of having this area of your life which we shall not discuss).  And my response to judgment stimuli – and even more so to a judgmental environment is: okay, well, since I can’t eliminate that which you think is abhorrent, I guess I need to manage the environment.  Post-divorce, vast parts of my life are viewed as abhorrent by many people – but I can’t and don’t want to get rid of them.  And for that matter, they aren’t abhorrent: I love my son.  I even love my ex-wife.  I don’t think I’ve sold my soul to her, and I’m proud of the fact that my soul is pledged to him.  But in an environment where lots of people – including those closest to me, although thankfully not the dog – have taken it upon themselves to view me as a font of awfulness, both in part and in some cases in whole, I’ve descended – it’s the right word – into bad habits of managing information for others.

Again, this does not work well in relationships.  If you want confirmation, I have a concise list of people to call.

I’m basically a Satrean existentialist, so I accept blame for all things at all times as a result of my implicit collusion in evil which is evidenced by my willingness to be alive in a world in which evil exists.  But let’s face it, even if I were just a normal self-centered human being, it’s my fault for hiding information.  It’s my responsibility to live up to the demands of radical honesty – especially in the relationships I have with those who are most dear to me, with those whom I love the most.  I have failed in doing that.  And I forgive myself even as I know I need to change, I need to get better.

And the thing is, the trigger for me – the fear of being judged – is often an illusion.  I’m worried about the potential for being judged.  I need to trust that I won’t be.  But in my family – and for whatever reason in the relationships I’ve chosen – that judgment come rolling along.  I guess I’m being “reverse trained” over time; the pain of losing relationships I held and continue to hold dear is teaching me how flawed this is.  But it still hurts to be judged.

Oh well.  Pop the bubble.