The Performance of Purpose

Whenever the subject of travelling to a non-English-speaking country comes up, my father grins broadly and asks whether I'll be trying the immersion method this time.

The joke goes back twenty-three years. Before I left to live in Italy for three months, I told everyone, my parents included, that I'd learn the language by full immersion. Surround yourself with it, refuse to lean on English, and you absorb it. I came home speaking no more Italian than when I left. He has never let me forget it. He asked about France. He asked more than once in the months before I left for Brazil, where I'm writing this now. He'll ask again. These days I don't laugh so much as chuckle to be polite and let it pass.

Taking the piss out of each other is how we show affection in my family, the way it is in a lot of families, and my father is a master of the form. There's the immersion method. There's also the sunburn. At nineteen I was riding his motorbike in the sun without a shirt, and when he told me to cover up I said I was moving too fast for the sun to get a lock on me. I was joking and thought he knew it (he didn't), and I was underestimating the country sun that day. I came home with second-degree burns and both arms gone purple. To this day, any time sunscreen comes up, he'll offer that maybe I'll move fast enough that the sun can't get a lock on me. Haw haw haw. I've learned to wear these send-ups like an old jumper. It itches, but I keep it anyway.

The immersion-method one lands a little differently from the rest, though. The sunburn was just a kid being a kid. The immersion method points at something I've spent most of my adult life trying to understand, and only recently found the words for.

To explain it I have to go back to Rome, and before I can do that, I have to go back further still.

I met the woman I'd spend the next eighteen years with at university. She'd been raised by devout Jehovah's Witnesses, where being with someone outside the faith meant being excommunicated and having her family cut all ties with her. She'd known since she was twelve that she morally objected to much of what the religion stood for, in particular what it expected of her, and that she wouldn't stay in it once she was a legal adult. She just didn't know when or how the break would come. At the end of her first year of university, she told her family about us and said she was leaving. They kept her at home for three days first. At one point, her father insisted on speaking to me by phone during those three days, and I spent hours arguing with a man I'd never met about a daughter who'd already made up her own mind. When she finally left, and the threats started, I was the one who found a lawyer to write the letter that made them stop.

She'd made the decision herself, for herself, years before I ever came along. She knew exactly who she was and what she was walking away from. But that isn't how I experienced it. I experienced it as a rescue. I'd saved her from a controlling father and a faith that would have swallowed her, and somewhere in there, without ever saying so out loud, being the man who'd done that became a large part of who I was to her, and to myself.

I want to be careful here, because this is easy to get wrong. I loved her, for good reason. The relationship was real, and it lasted nearly two decades, and it was about far more than my need to be useful to someone. And the saviour reflex was woven all the way through it from the very start, shaping how I showed up for the next several years. The weight of it was heavier still because I felt she'd left her family in large part for me, which meant I had to be not only her devoted partner but also, somehow, enough to make up for the whole family she'd lost. Being needed wasn't the whole of what we were. It was, though, the part I'd quietly built myself on.

So, when she won a scholarship to do three months of doctoral research in Italy four years later, and made it gently clear she didn't want to spend three months without me, there was never really a question about whether I'd go. I went.

But before I went, I built a story about why.

I told everyone I'd be supporting her, of course, but also seizing the chance of a lifetime. Three months as a full-time tourist on the other side of the world, time and freedom in equal measure. I'd immerse myself in the language and the culture. I'd finally have dedicated time to write fiction every day, in one of the most inspiring places on earth. Who couldn't write a novel in Italy?

I told that story well, so well that I think I was the one who believed it the most. Looking back, I can see I was performing it harder for myself than for anyone else.

After we arrived, the story lasted about two weeks before falling apart.

It's hard to convey now how alone I was over there. This was 2003. No smartphones, no social media, no internet in the small apartment we rented in Rome. Checking my email meant walking to an internet café and paying a small fortune for thirty minutes on a machine that belonged in a museum. Everything on the tiny TV was dubbed into Italian. We had no landline, and overseas calls were prohibitively expensive anyway. I didn't speak Italian and I didn't know anybody there. She left early each morning for the libraries and came back in the evening with just enough energy for a couple of hours of conversation before sleep, and then she was gone again.

For the first time in years, I was alone with myself, in a city where I couldn't read the street signs, and I found out fast that I had no idea who I was when there was nobody around for me to be useful to. No one to save. No one to take care of. Just me, and not much of me at that.

The drinking started quietly. Alcohol was cheap and everywhere, and a few drinks over dinner became a few in the late afternoon, and the late afternoon kept creeping earlier. One weekend, around midday, I was sitting on the edge of the bed with my second or third scotch and coke, and she broke down crying. She said she felt she'd dragged me there against my will, and that now she was turning me into an alcoholic.

She was exaggerating, and I told her so. Going was my choice, so was the drinking, and I never let her take responsibility for either one. But under the exaggeration there was something true, and we both heard it land.

The writing I'd promised everyone did happen, sort of. I wrote science fiction and thriller stories on a battered second-hand laptop that had a thick grey bar across half the screen, given to me by an academic before I left. I wrote a novella and was proud of it. None of this writing was ever published, and I'm not sure I even looked at it much after I got home. The writing wasn't a lie, it just wasn't the real reason, or even a core one, for why I was there. It was set dressing for a purpose I didn't have.

What I remember most clearly is what I kept saying to her in those first few weeks, that I had no idea who I was outside of our relationship. Somewhere along the line I'd traded "I" for "us" on every question that mattered for me, and now, with all the usual distractions stripped away, there didn't seem to be an "I" left to find. I was proud of her, I told her I meant it completely. She'd worked hard and earned the scholarship, the trip, all of it. The problem was never her, it was that I couldn't answer what should've been a simple question. Who are you, when nobody needs anything from you?

I didn't have the right words for any of this back then. I'd have called it an identity crisis, if I'd called it anything. It took me years to see what had been going on, which was something quieter and more uncomfortable.

Somehow, I'd never built a strong sense of self. I'd only ever been a rescuer.

The rescue had become the structure I stood on. Saving her had given me a purpose, a role, a method, other ways of mattering, and as long as there was someone to take care of and something to protect her from, I never had to ask who I'd be without it. Italy didn't need saving from anything. No villain, no threat, no father on the phone. There was nothing for the rescuer to do, and with the rescuer out of work, there was very little man remaining. So I manufactured a reason to be there. The novel, the immersion, the opportunity of a lifetime, all of it rushed in to cover a hole where a self was supposed to be.

That's the part worth slowing down on, because I don't think I'm unusual in it.

A lot of men confuse confidence with conviction, and the two aren't the same thing at all. Confidence faces outward. It's the performance of certainty, and you can carry it into any room, tell any story, hold any dinner table, while having no real idea what you want or believe. Conviction is the core, the foundation, that confidence rests on. It's internal, and it's drawn from somewhere that's genuinely your own. A man running on confidence alone is putting on a convincing show with nothing solid beneath his feet, and that gap, between how certain I seemed and how little I knew, was exactly where I was living, in Rome and for a long time before it.

In Italy the gap got exposed fast, because the place was merciless about it. Take away the language, the friends, the context, the usefulness, and the performance had nowhere to hide and no one to play to. That's why the story fell apart in less than two weeks.

That's the mercy of a hard environment. It reveals the truth quickly.

The danger is the forgiving environment. The life that fits well enough that nobody, you included, has any reason to look too closely. A man can perform a purpose inside a career, a marriage, a city, a whole version of himself, for ten or twenty years or more, because the rewards are real and nothing ever forces the gap open. The story stays coherent. It holds up in every meeting and at every dinner. It just doesn't hold up at three in the morning, when it goes quiet enough that the performance has no audience.

I'd like to tell you Rome fixed me. It didn't, but it taught me something, and for a good while I built a life that was genuinely my own. My own work, my own interests, my own direction. I found a version of myself I recognised and thought the lesson had taken for good.

Then, years later, at one of the lowest points I've known, fractured and adrift, I met someone. She was going through a hard divorce and cast herself as someone who needed rescuing, and even in that state, lost and depleted as I was, I was only too willing to play the part. Same pattern, more obvious this time. The damsel, the villain she was escaping, and me, riding in to be needed again. If you've read earlier editions of The Reckoning, you know how that one ended. I won't retell it here. I mention it only to be honest about something. This isn't a lesson you learn once and address for good, as a one-and-done deal. The pattern doesn't die because you spotted it a single time. It waits for the conditions that bring it back.

And I should be straight about what was driving it, because the noble version is a lie. I wasn't saving these women. The rescue was never about them. It was about me, about wanting to feel useful and significant, and needing to matter to someone because I didn't yet know how to matter to myself. That's the part most of us would rather not look at. It's far more comfortable to be the hero of someone else's story than to sit with the fact that you don't have one of your own.

I see it frequently now, in the men I work with and in the men I grew up around. The ones who feel and look quietly unhappy but who struggle to make a change for the better, who instead spin the dissatisfaction into something that sounds noble. The sacrifices they're making for the people who depend on them. The unhappy marriage they're enduring "for the kids." It can look like selflessness from the outside. Often, it's a man who would rather perform a contrived purpose than go looking for a real one, because the looking means admitting he doesn't have it yet.

What eventually shifted for me wasn't dramatic. I simply stopped asking what the people around me needed me to be, and started sitting with the harder questions. What do I want? What do I believe? Why am I in the room I'm in? Not the story that makes my choices look good to other people, but the thing that would still be there if nobody were watching at all.

I'm writing this in Brazil, where my wife is from, and where, same as Italy, I don't speak the language.

My father asked me whether I'd be trying the immersion method this time, of course, haw haw haw. The funny thing is that the immersion method is real, and it works, if you simply do it. The joke was never that the method failed me. The joke, though he's never put it this way and probably never will, is that the younger version of me announced a purpose he had no intention of living out, and everyone could see it but him.

Because here's the truth of it. I'm a different man in this country than I was in that one. I'm not here performing a contrived purpose so I'll look like a bigger character in someone else's story. I'm here because of a life I chose, with a person I chose, built on something that's mine. The Italian I didn't learn then, and the Portuguese I haven't learned yet, look the same. The difference is everything that sits beneath them.

In Rome, not speaking the language was one more sign that I didn't know why I was there. In Brazil, not speaking the language is just a thing I haven't got to yet, because I'm certain of the rest. Whether or not you speak the language is irrelevant, knowing who you are and why you're in the room is what matters.

So, here's the question I'd leave with any man reading this. The story you tell about your life, the one that holds up so well in company, does it still hold up when the room is empty and the house is quiet and there's no one left to tell it to?

And if it doesn't, whose purpose have you been performing all this time?

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