Who Am I Still Trying to Prove Myself To?

When I was little, I thought that getting older would put things right. One day I would be able to decide for myself. I would choose where my life went, what I did with it and who I wanted to be. I did not know exactly what that life would look like, but I believed there was something on the other side of childhood that would make living feel easier. I would be an adult. Surely that would change enough.

I am forty now. I work hard, I earn very well, and I can make decisions that would have been far beyond the child I was. There are people I can help and things I can make possible. Yet when I ask myself who I am, I still struggle to answer. I seem to be trying to prove something through what I do, and I cannot say whose recognition would allow me to feel that I had finally proved it.

The people around me say that what I do is amazing, or honourable. I hear them. I know those words contain appreciation. But somehow my attention moves towards what else I could do, what else I could give, who else I could help. I want to understand why I find it so difficult to feel pleased with what I am doing while I am doing it. Why does the possibility of more seem to have so much authority over what is already here?

When I say that I feel divided, this is part of what I mean. I want to help, and I also need to stop. I become emotionally exhausted, yet I still want to help everyone. The wish does not disappear because I am tired. Sometimes I can state both sides of that difficulty very clearly and still have no idea how to live with them together.

There is another part too. Giving is one of the times when I feel most myself. So the question becomes difficult even to ask. How can something in which I recognise myself so clearly leave me wondering who I am? And why, after everything I have done, do I still feel that there is someone I have not managed to reach?

What it meant to have a place

When I look back at childhood, the absence of dependable care is something I understand more fully now. As a small boy in Poland, there were times when I had to find food and water for myself. In writing about those memories, I have tried to preserve what the child experienced alongside what the adult understands. I could be happy because I had found something to eat. I can remember that happiness and still see how much care should have been there.

That is one of the difficulties of looking back. My ability to find something can make the memory sound like a story about resourcefulness. There was resourcefulness in it. But I was also a child who needed someone to make sure he could eat and drink safely. I did not have to become an impressive adult for that need to matter. I would want to remember that if I were listening to another person tell me the same story.

I was about six and a half when I went to Sweden with my sister, my brother and the couple who had adopted us. I did not understand that adoption meant my life would continue there. I thought we were going for a visit, something like a holiday. I was afraid of returning to the orphanage in Poland, or of having nowhere to live, but I still expected that I would go back. Wanting to stay and believing I might have to leave existed together.

At about seven, I was taken on nighttime trips to the ferry port in Ystad. I remember being told that I was not wanted and should go to the ferry to be sent back to Poland. I believed it could happen. I was frightened, and I was told that I had to be good and do as I was told or I would be sent back another time. Those memories are part of what I mean when I say that having somewhere to live did not always give me a secure feeling of belonging.

There was kindness and happiness in those years too. I remember my adoptive father’s mother being wonderful to me. I remember my fascination with a switch inside the house that turned on a light in the garden. And I remember Stampe, the grey stuffed rabbit I brought with me from Poland. In bed, I held him close and talked to him. I took care that he was comfortable, warm and unafraid. That small act of care belongs to the same childhood as the fear.

I have told more of that story in I Thought Sweden Was a Vacation. Looking at it now, I wonder what it meant to grow up with the possibility that getting something wrong could cost me my place. I cannot trace every decision I make today back to those journeys. But I also cannot pretend that the question of being wanted began only when I became an adult.

Perhaps that is one reason my childhood hope was too simple. I could grow old enough to choose where to go and still have questions about whether I belonged. The ability to take responsibility for my life could develop while the wish for someone dependable remained. At forty, I can do many things for myself. I still know what it is to miss having people around me whom I can count on.

When giving feels like me

I work and earn money, but I do not want to feel rich. I do not want to keep it all for myself. I give it away, keeping only what I need to live. Some people have called me stupid for that. I can understand that this choice may look difficult to explain from outside. From where I stand, giving is often where I feel clearest about what I want to do with what I have.

To be honest, when I am giving, that is when I feel I am myself. That matters to me because it would be easy to let the question about approval explain too much. I care about children. I care about people. I want to help them with my whole heart. Those feelings deserve to remain visible while I examine the things I do not understand about myself.

I know what it is to need something that is not within reach. That knowledge is part of what I bring to the way I see other people’s circumstances. Money can make a practical difference to what is possible, and having it gives me choices about how to help. I find meaning in that possibility. Keeping more for myself would not automatically answer the question of what I wanted my work and earnings to be for.

At the same time, being certain that I want to give does not make every question about the cost irrelevant. Someone can misunderstand why generosity matters to me and still notice that I am tired. I would like to be able to consider that concern without feeling that I must defend the whole of who I am. There is something worth understanding in my exhaustion, even when I stand behind the help I have given.

What I find difficult is that the feelings are so close together. I can recognise a choice as mine and still feel driven towards the next one. I can want another person to receive help and also want, somewhere in my own life, to feel recognised. I do not know how much these wishes influence one another. The people I help have needs of their own; my questions about myself do not make their lives a measure of whether I have become enough.

When I say that I cannot find myself, then, I need to be precise. I am not without convictions or unable to recognise anything that matters to me. There is a great deal of me in the care I want to give. What I cannot find is the point at which I can look at that care, let it count, and stop asking what more is required.

Wanting to continue, needing to stop

The clearest cost I can name is emotional exhaustion. I become very tired inside, while the desire to help remains. It is a difficult combination because caring gives me a reason to continue even when I can feel the cost. I do not stop seeing the importance of another person’s need merely because I have reached a limit of my own.

There is a difference I am trying to understand between accepting a cost because something matters to me and continuing as though my own condition carries no weight. I do not expect generosity to be effortless. Something can take time, money or energy and still be a choice I want to make. The difficulty is knowing how to take my exhaustion seriously while I still believe in what I am doing.

I have written about being useful and being known, and about how easily a person’s place can become tied to what they provide. Here, the question turns towards the way I see myself. Even when other people express admiration, I keep asking for more from myself. Their appreciation does not seem to give me permission to feel that what I have done is enough. I do not know where I expect that permission to come from.

Perhaps part of the difficulty lies in what I am measuring. What I have done is something I can look at. What I could still do has no clear end. There may always be another possibility, another way to contribute, another person I would want to help. If satisfaction has to wait until I can no longer imagine giving anything more, I cannot see how I would ever reach it.

Yet seeing that on the page does not settle it in me. I can understand the problem and still feel the pull of another possibility. I can know that wanting to help everyone is more than I can fulfil and still want it with the same intensity. There is no simple change of wording that makes the emotional part agree with the reasoning.

What I would like is to feel that stopping for a while could belong to the same life as caring deeply. I do not want to have to lose my desire to help before I can take my tiredness seriously. I would like to be able to say that something I have done mattered, even if another need remains. At present, that feels easier to wish for than to live.

The words I still wish to hear

There is one absence I can name without having to explain all the others. I never heard someone tell me they were proud of me. I cannot know what anybody may have felt privately, and I would not want to turn the absence of those words into a claim that nobody ever cared. I can say that I did not hear them. I can say that I still wish I had.

When I am proud of someone, I tell them. I want the feeling to reach the person it concerns. It matters to me that they know what I see in them, what they have done or what they have achieved. And I recognise how much I would like to receive that myself. To be honest, I would be truly happy if someone told me they were proud of me.

Why does that feel different from hearing that something I have done is amazing or honourable? I am still trying to understand it. Perhaps admiration can feel like an assessment of an action, while being told that someone is proud of me would feel more personal. I imagine it as another person recognising something of the effort and the life behind what they see. That is how the wish feels to me; I cannot assume everyone uses those words in the same way.

The appreciation people already offer still matters. I would not want to demand that they use one particular phrase before their kindness counts. But I also want to be honest about the difference I feel. I can be grateful for what someone says and still have a longing it does not quite reach. That leaves me with something to understand about myself, rather than a reason to decide that everyone else has failed.

I wonder whether I am waiting for something I needed much earlier. Perhaps that is why I struggle to identify the person I am trying to impress now. I do not know. I cannot put a name to the voice and claim that hearing it would finally make everything right. What I can recognise is the effort: doing more, giving more, and still feeling that there is something left to prove.

I have told myself many times that I am proud of myself. I have tried to acknowledge what I have done and achieved. But in the end, it is still me saying it. When I say that this is not enough, I am describing how it feels. My own words have not answered the wish for another person to see me and say something that matters to me.

That is a vulnerable thing to admit at forty. The adult I expected to become would have his own decisions and his own life. I have that freedom now, and I still want another person to recognise me in this way. I can take responsibility, earn money and help people while carrying that wish. I would like to understand it without treating it as another failure I must compensate for by achieving more.

Someone a child can count on

When I think about what I missed as a child, I return to the stability of having people around me. I still miss that kind of family network. I feel lonely without it. I cannot know precisely how my life would have developed if it had been there, but I believe I would have felt more secure as a little boy if I had known there was someone I could depend on.

That is part of why I hope to create a family home for children in Ukraine. It remains something I am exploring and want to make possible. I think about children who have lost parents and about families where a surviving parent cannot manage everything alone. I would want to understand what help is needed. Above all, I want a child to feel that there are adults who will take responsibility for their care.

I know what being without that security meant to me. It does not tell me everything about what another child will need. Each would bring a different life, different attachments and their own grief. I would want the home to have room for those differences. The people the children have lost would still matter, and care in the present would have to respect that.

When I think about that home, I want to keep the children’s experience at the centre: whether they felt safe, whether they had someone to count on, whether they could trust the care around them. I want to offer something dependable. Thinking about that also makes me take the question of my own limits seriously. Wanting to give everything does not, by itself, tell me how to provide care that can continue.

I think again of Stampe beside me in bed, and of how I wanted him to be warm and unafraid. I can still recognise that wish to care. I can also see the boy who needed care himself. Being able to help others has not removed my own need for care. There are things I can give, and things I still miss.

I have not found the person I am trying to prove myself to. I have not learned how to feel satisfied simply because someone tells me that what I do is admirable. But I know that helping matters to me, and I know that I am tired. I would like to give those facts enough room that one does not have to silence the other. And I would still be truly happy to hear someone say they were proud of me, while I was here, at forty, still trying to understand my life.