Now that my family and I have completed our time in Japan, we’ve begun the next phase of our life. We are currently in the home country of my wife, Hungary, and we’re living with her dad while she continues with her pregnancy. Our time here is primarily for her to experience life here once again, and to verify or contradict the feelings she has had for this country since she left here some 16 years ago. She wanted to see if her memories of this place were all justified, and that it really is where she’s wanted to be all this time, or if it was just a sense of nostalgia that clouded her mind, and that life here is way more difficult than she remembered it being.
What this means for me is that it is now my turn to re-enter the workforce after a near 4 year hiatus. To be honest, I couldn’t be happier to do it, since I’ve been sort of champing at the bit for quite some time to get out of the house. While I have loved having the time with my daughter these last 2+ years, I’ve discovered, in no uncertain terms, that I am not cut out to be a stay at home dad. I maintained well enough, and my little girl seems to have grown up happy and relatively well adjusted (she is still my kid, so she’s going to be kind of weird), but I never thrived and I don’t think I ever could in a home environment. Mentally, I’m just wired to work, and collect paychecks, and feel like I’m contributing monetarily to my household.
Of course, there is hesitation when thinking about returning to work after 4 years. There’s the question of whether or not I’m actually ready to go back. My readiness may not be equal to my desire, and that could lead to some pretty bad failures when I go back to work. How much will I miss my family during the day? That’s a big one, because I’ve known nothing but time with my daughter during all this time. And of course, one of my biggest concerns is whether or not I’ll actually be able to find some meaningful work after having been out of the industry for 4 years. The world of IT is ever evolving, and I’ve been out of the game for what might as well be a whole era.
Job-hunting can be a soul crushing experience. You’re reduced to your accomplishments and how well you can state them on a piece of paper (or in a Word document as the case is nowadays) and you send out hundreds if not thousands of them, knowing that you’re going to be rejected time and time again. You may feel as if you are a shining star in a sea of darkness, and that you should be easily picked out, and picked up, but in reality, you’re just another point of light in an otherwise packed sky, and you just have to be lucky enough to be picked by that one company that will take a chance and check you out up close. Meanwhile, you sit there, and wait, and wonder if you did everything right to feel like you shined as bright or as interestingly as you could, but feeling as though you screwed something up royally, and they’re huddled in their little HR cubicles, looking at your resume and laughing at your inept attempt to look employable. It’s enough to make a person lose it a little bit, and honestly, it can kill a person’s self-worth.
And that got me thinking about the last four years, and what my worth has been. After a couple of rejection letters from a few companies in the last month and a half, I’ve begun to wonder just what I’m worth now, and what I’ve been worth the last few years that I’ve been without work. Internally, I feel as though I’ve been a kind of paperweight to this family. I have a function, but it could really be accomplished by anything of sufficient weight and size, and in most cases, you don’t even really need it. There were times I honestly thought things would be better if I weren’t around, instead of being there and just taking up space. This feeling has been even stronger lately, since my wife is now no longer working, and actually has time to be the stay at home parent to spend the time with our child.
I’ve expressed these feelings to my wife, and some friends, and time and again, they’ve told me how awesome I am, and that things will work out, and that it’s just a matter of time. Of course, I’ve always been the impatient type, and hearing platitudes has never done much to placate my worries. However, it does make me examine myself (big surprised huh?) and brings up the question, how do you quantify your self worth?
Is it based on how much money you bring home? How much time and effort you spend cleaning the house, washing the clothes, bathing the kids? How good the food you cook tastes? How much you can make your kid laugh? How much you make your spouse laugh? I’ve struggled with this question for much of my life, because when I think back on it, I can’t really say that I’ve ever felt that I’ve been worth much. There have been moments where I’ve had little triumphs along the way that gave me a sense of joy and accomplishment, but they never had any lasting effects on my feelings of self-worth.
These last few years have really been testing those feelings. I don’t think I’ve ever felt quite as low as I’ve felt these last few years. However, there’s always a need to soldier on, to take care of my responsibilities, so I put those thoughts as far out of my head as I could. I just did what I had to, and spent my spare moments losing myself in hobbies, video games, and esoteric thoughts. But going through the job-hunting process has put a lot of my insecurities into sharp focus, and it’s one of those times where confrontation of those feelings had to happen, or there would be negative consequences.
So how does one go about judging their self-worth? The only thing that has had any sort of meaning for me is how happy the people around you are, and how much of an effect you had on that happiness. From speaking to my family and friends, I’ve discovered that I’ve surprisingly had a positive influence on their lives, even without really noticing it. My existence on this planet has helped to impact people in a positive way, and that is really the only thing that I can say, for myself, has a lasting effect on my feelings. If I wasn’t here, than the net positive effects that I’ve been able to have on people’s lives wouldn’t be there. It may not be anything tangible; I can’t exactly hold other people’s happiness in my hand and count it, but when I know that people miss me, and want to be around me, that’s as good a way as any to know that you’re loved and wanted, and it tells you something about your self-worth.
Does this mean that I’ll be able to go forward without feeling any insecurities about myself again? Probably not, and I’ll backslide into depression again, because that’s always been my cycle. But it’s important to keep the good things in mind, or it ends up being a fight that you’re just beating yourself in. I’ll likely question myself over and over again, and feel worse until I finally find work and feel like I’m legitimately contributing again (even if I’ve been contributing all this time). Even then, the job would just be a bandage to patch up one tiny cut in my admittedly beat up psyche, but at least it would be one less thing on my mind. Until then, I have to keep doing what I can to do good by others, and maybe, hopefully, things will work out (even though I still really hate that phrase).
