My father died believing he was a failure. From his perspective, he had failed, because he had been unable to secure full-time employment after losing his job during the pandemic. He lost his house and had almost no money when he died. He based a lot of his self worth on external measures of success, and he believed that he did not measure up.
Growing up, I watched my father cycle between periods of financial wealth and abundance, and periods of collapse and bankruptcy. He would make money, and then spend it all. We would lose everything, and he would begin again. I was amazed at how he could pivot every time. And yet, he stubbornly persisted in repeating the same mistakes over and over, never really slowing down to consider if there was another way. What he was chasing was the need to prove that he wasn’t a failure, because in his own eyes, he believed he was a failure.
My father was absent for a big part of my childhood. And the times that he was in my life, he was a force of violence and destruction. As a little girl growing up, I did not understand the pain he was in. It was only later in my adult life, working through my own pain, trauma, and suffering that I realized he was not evil, he was not bad, he was simply a person in a lot of pain, struggling to come to terms with his own fears and doubts.
He had grown up in an abusive home and had struggled for most of his life. He had seen war and was thrown into things he never wanted to be part of. How he chose to cope with his pain, was to turn to alcohol. Alcohol was how he numbed the pain. And I’m reminded of what Brené Brown said, “You can’t numb selectively.” When you numb the pain, the grief, the shame, you are also numbing your ability to experience joy, love, connection, presence. And that certainly was true for my father for many years of his life. I have very few memories of him being happy or at peace. The overarching memory I have of my father, is that he was stressed, worried, and angry a lot of the time.
When I was a child, his anger frightened me. And later, as an adult, when I worked through my own suppressed anger, I started to understand that anger is often a mask for fear and shame, and I started to understand that my father’s anger masked his fear and his shame – and there was a lot of it.
On 12 December 2017, I left South Africa and immigrated to Canada. On that day, my father stopped drinking, and he spent the last eight years of his life sober. I grew up with an alcoholic father. My children received the gift of a sober grandfather. I never asked my father why he had stopped drinking, and honestly, it was because I was so afraid that if I asked about it, he would start drinking again, and I was so grateful that he had stopped.
In the last eight years of his life, I got to know a different man – someone who had a lot of regrets, someone who didn’t know how to say he was sorry, and yet, was somehow gentler and more present. I witnessed a man who was strong, persistent, resilient, and grateful for the small things. I watched him show more vulnerability, and face moments where he had to ask for help. And I know how hard that was for him, and I admired his courage and vulnerability.
I watched him awkwardly hold his newborn granddaughter in his arms, and smile the biggest smile I had ever seen him smile. I took him to see his favourite musician – Bruce Springsteen – in concert and watched him dance with childlike joy, deeply immersed in the music and the moment. I watched him kick a ball to his grandson, and laugh. I watched him go from someone who believed so strongly that he was always right, to someone who realized that “right” is relative.
I watched him continuing to struggle with work and money, and I was amazed at his creativity and his persistence. My dad was someone who simply did not have the word “quit” in his vocabulary. I’m not always sure if it was stubbornness or brilliance. And yet, I admired him for the ways he could find hope in even the darkest of moments. He had hit rock bottom so many times in his life, and every time, he would find a way to get back up and begin again.
I know that I got my resilience and my fighting spirit from him. I know that I also push myself too hard, just like he did. My father’s context for life was that life was a battlefield and that only the strong survive. He believed that he had to fight for survival and that there was no other way. I inherited that belief, and spent much of my young life believing I had to fight for what I wanted, that nothing comes easy, and that I had to be strong – stronger and smarter than everyone else to survive.
I had the opportunity to question that belief and whether it truly serves me in my life or not, and over the past six years, I have fundamentally shifted that belief. I no longer see the world as a battlefield, and I no longer believe that I have to fight for survival. I also now see true strength and courage in vulnerability which, to me, has become a game changer. My life and relationships are deeper, richer, and more meaningful, because I have allowed myself to be more vulnerable. I am most certainly still chipping away at the deeper roots of these beliefs, and I know that my lens is different.
My father never had the opportunity to question his beliefs, or shift his perspective in this way, and yet, Life forced him to face situations that had him grow, even if it wasn’t necessarily a conscious choice to do so. He was always going to stop drinking, because he did. He was always going to be one of my greatest teachers, because he was.
My father died believing he had failed. What I saw, was a man who never stopped trying. What I saw was a man who was willing to stop numbing the pain, and start facing his fears, which required an incredible amount of courage. My father made a choice to be sober, and he honoured that choice to the end. It was as if a switch had flipped in his mind and he became a non-drinker. I never asked him why he stopped drinking, and I know that whatever led him to that choice was something that mattered more than numbing the pain. The story I choose to believe, is that losing me had him wake up to the realization that he was missing out on his children and grandchildren, and he chose to show up more for the daughter he still had in South Africa.
What I saw was a gentle and grateful grandfather. What I saw was someone who had lost so much, and could still find hope and gratitude in the simple things. What I saw was someone who loved more and gave more of himself in his last eight years on earth. What I saw was how people came together when he died, and how much he was loved, because he was always willing to offer a helping hand. He had a certain charm about him. He was fiercely loyal, and he valued honesty. He had come a long way from the young man who didn’t know how to be a father.
Perspective matters. The stories we tell ourselves matter. Recently a client shared this quote by Thich Nhat Hanh with me, “We are the thought, and then the thought becomes us“. Our thoughts are not external events that happen to us. We are the creators of our thoughts. They originate from within us. Our thoughts reflect our own inner landscape. We don’t see the world the way it is, we see the world the way we are.
There is a cyclical nature in thought and its impact. Our thoughts, once generated, can have a profound influence on our actions, beliefs, and even our physical health. They can shape how we perceive ourselves and the world around us, and thus, become a part of our identity and experience. For my father that meant that he saw the world as a battlefield, and spent his whole life fighting a battle he believed was real. He lived in fear of being a failure, and measured his worth against external measures of success – money, status, prestige etc. During cycles of wealth and abundance, he believed himself to be successful, and during cycles of challenge and struggle, he believed himself to be a failure. He lived in constant fear of losing everything. He lost his job, his home, and had no income, and yet, he gained relationships with his children and grandchildren. He gained community, connection, and family.
His impact on my life was profound, and what I’ve lost was the man I started to get to know in the last eight years. What I lost was the childhood I could never have. What I lost was the opportunity to let him know how proud I was of him, and how grateful I was that he made different choices. My dad wasn’t rich or famous, and yet, his impact on my life was profound. We often believe that our lives need to be big on the outside for us to have an impact, and that simply is not true. It’s not the breadth and the width of your impact that matters, but the depth of it.
Who did you connect with? Who did you share your dreams and fears with? Who did you help and support in this lifetime? Who did you love? And who loved you? What wounds did you heal? What stories did you let go of? What new beliefs did you create? The truth is that you will never really know, because you will never really know your impact on others. How others perceive you, depends on their internal thoughts and perceptions – i.e., the lens they are using to look at the world.
For this reason, I so strongly believe that the most important choice you can make is to become someone YOU can be proud of, no matter what others might think or believe. There will be people who agree with your choices and there will be people who disagree with your choices. Their perspective of you, is only that – their lens and their thoughts in that moment when they formed their opinion of you. Someone else’s opinion is not a fact about who you are. It’s their perception of you in that specific moment. And you, my dear, are a forever-changing and evolving person whose personality isn’t fixed but gets shaped by the thoughts you choose to entertain in your mind.
What are the stories you tell yourself that have turned into self-fulfilling prophecies? Imagine what your life would be like if you didn’t have that programming? If you could wake up tomorrow with amnesia, and not recall who you are or your history, who would you want to create yourself to be? If you had no previous conditioning or programming, what programming would you want to adopt?