I Was the Provider. When I Lost That, I Lost Myself.
For as long as I can remember, being the provider was the one thing I was certain about. It was the role I understood. Work hard, bring home money, make sure the people you love don't have to worry.
So when I lost my job, I didn't just lose an income. I lost my entire sense of who I was. It happened fast, the way these things usually do. A restructure, a meeting with HR, a box of belongings carried to my car on a Tuesday afternoon.
I drove home in the middle of the day feeling like a stranger in my own life. My wife was at work. The house was empty and quiet, and I sat at the kitchen table for an hour doing nothing because I genuinely didn't know what to do with myself outside of the context of a job.
The first few weeks I kept up appearances. I told people I was "taking some time to explore options." I set an alarm every morning so my wife wouldn't see me sleeping in. I refreshed my email constantly looking for replies to applications, as if a quick turnaround would mean the whole thing hadn't really happened.
What I wasn't doing was talking about how I actually felt. Because how I actually felt was ashamed. My wife was now the sole earner. She never once made me feel bad about it — she was patient and kind and told me repeatedly that we were fine. But the voice inside my head wasn't nearly as understanding. It told me I had failed. That I wasn't pulling my weight. That a man who can't provide isn't much of a man at all.
What eventually helped wasn't finding a new job — though that helped too. It was admitting out loud, to my wife that my self-worth had become so tied to my earning that I had no idea who I was without it. I had confused my function with my identity. Somewhere along the way I had reduced all of that down to a salary. Rebuilding took longer than I expected. Not the career — the sense of self. If you're in it right now, hear this: what you earn is not who you are. It took me losing everything I'd built to finally understand that.
Hasib Afzal