The Chronic Curmudgeon

Thankfully, with a couple years’ notable exception, for most of my life I’ve had control of that silent chip. I’ve been able to use it as a fulcrum which, when combined with the levers of hard work and my abilities, has taken me everywhere I have gone and allowed me to do whatever I have done. That chip has driven me. It’s made me who I am.

When I was a kid, I used that feeling to drive myself to get better grades than anyone else; I had to, because I wasn’t giving anyone any excuses to not give me a chance. In sports, I was going to play harder than you were, no matter our game. There might be other players on the field who were more naturally gifted than I was, but by God there was never going to be anyone who hustled more, ran harder, left more of himself on the field. You could bloody me up, break something, knock me out… but you weren’t going to try harder than me.

In my first career, politics, I believed that no one was taking a 22 year old who felt he could be running campaigns seriously; so when an incumbent who was going to win anyway gave me the chance to work his campaign, I was going to be damn sure that we won by a bigger margin than we were supposed to. And we did. The next time around, we won a race we weren’t supposed to win. I expected nothing less; I had something to prove.

Professionally, I’ve spent much of my second career believing that no one was going to give me anything that I didn’t take from them through sheer force of will. There were a couple of people I have run into who legitimately seemed to have it in for me -- well, okay, one person, but she was high enough up and influential enough that she did do some damage to me, and the reality of her impact just reinforced my outlook.

When I moved to the northeast, the chip quadrupled in size. The northeast is (as I have mentioned ad nauseum) parochial and tends to have what you would either describe as a dismissive attitude toward the rest of the country, or an artificially inflated view of its own superiority… and here I was, the blue-collar kid from flyover country.

Suddenly the people I was working with and living among had degrees from big-name colleges; they drove cars that cost more than my college education had; they had money, and I did not; they were Establishment, and I most certainly was not. I was just the guy from farm country who talked with the funny Minnesota “Fargo” accent.

In part from the attitudes I encountered, and in part from my need to imagine myself having to overcome resistance, I decided that the Northeast Establishment wasn’t going to give me anything that I didn’t forcibly pry from its hands. If ever I had anything to prove, it was that this kid from the turnip truck could hang just fine with everyone who thought that the geographic or socio-economic accident of their birth made them smarter or better than me.

I’ve tried never to let it outwardly show or impact how I treat people. Rather, it’s just been this thing, whether real or manufactured, that I didn’t even have to tell myself; I just knew that there was a “they” out there that didn’t want to give me a chance, and I was going to have to force them into having no choice but to give me one. That’s been my quiet resolve, and it’s served me pretty well until now.

But increasingly in the last year, this conceit has become more than impractical; it’s becoming flat out unproductive. The illusion simply will not hold anymore. I can’t look at my life or my career and imagine much aligned against me; by most any standard I ever would have set for myself, I have done well by the world and it by me. I’ve had incredible opportunities and made the most of them. I have a network of professional mentors and advocates who have actively gone out of their way to teach me, to help me, and to guide me when my own instincts don’t speak clearly enough to me. Today I have an array of newer opportunities and horizons I never even thought within reach. And I’ve realized that I can no longer realistically imagine any cosmic or earthly alignment opposing me.

So what’s the problem, you ask? It’s simple: without that chip on my shoulder, I feel lost. It hasn’t just been my motivation; it’s been a great deal of my self-definition and self-image. And when you’ve spent the better part of a third of a century becoming accustomed to the presence of an influence or factor or belief, its sudden disappearance is quite disorienting. It’s like finding out that my grown-up version of Santa Claus doesn’t exist anymore.

I am going through a really weird phase right now. With the way my life has gone lately -- professionally, financially, emotionally -- I should be on top of the world. Unquestionably, the perks of life and opportunities presented to me right now (on many, many different levels) are beyond anything I ever realistically hoped I would ever have. And yet, instead of feeling triumphant, or a sense of pride and achievement, I just feel rudderless. For someone who’s always felt an obsessive need to make sure he was in control of his own destiny, this loss of surety in direction is kind of messing with me.

During a rather revealing, if philosophical, conversation recently, someone asked me “who are you?“ The thing is, without that familiar and by now comfortable invisible chip on my shoulder, I don’t know exactly how to answer that. Or at least, I don’t know what I want. That’s maybe the better way of putting it. I have all these different directions I could go, professionally, personally, financially, and in any other way; all these different things that could serve as the trampoline to the next part of my life… and I’ve no longer the compass that I’ve always used to point myself in the right direction.

It’s like I climbed up this long hill clutching a map, never sure I would reach the top… and when I got there, there were a dozen paths I could follow, and just then the wind gusted and the map slipped from my hands. The good news is that there’s any number of paths that can be traveled now, all of which might lead someplace amazing; the bad is that I have no idea which is the right one -- because for a path to be the “right” one, you sort of have to know where you want it to lead. And right now, I don’t.

I have a lot of decisions to make in the coming months, decisions that will go a long way toward determining who I will be for much of the rest of my life -- both to the outside world and inside my own heart. The disorienting thing is that I don’t have any sense of which direction I will go. The exhilarating thing is that I get to choose; from now on, there is no “them” working to stop me, and no chip on my shoulder weighing me down.

It’s going to be an interesting year.