THE INTERVIEW

Beat 9: The Identity Crisis

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Q40. "Who would you say knows you best?"

The question seemed simple. It wasn't.

Dale turned it over in his mind, testing the weight of each possible answer. Linda—thirty-one years of marriage, she should know him better than anyone. But did she? They'd built a life together, raised a daughter, weathered the seasons of a long partnership. But knowing someone's habits wasn't the same as knowing them. She knew he took his coffee black. She knew he slept on the left side of the bed. She knew he rubbed his eyes when he was tired and went quiet when he was angry. But did she know him? The inside of him, the parts he'd never shown anyone?

"I don't know," he said finally. "I'm not sure anyone does."

Ms. Vance tilted her head slightly. "Not even Linda?"

"Linda knows me better than anyone else. But that's—" He paused, searching for the right way to say it. "That's different from knowing me. She knows the version of me I've shown her. The husband version. The provider version. But there are parts of me I've never—"

"Never what?"

"Never let anyone see." The admission came out quiet, almost reluctant. "Parts I don't even like to look at myself."

"Like what?"

Dale was silent for a long moment. The HVAC hummed. The lights buzzed. The room held its breath.

"The doubt," he said at last. "The fear that I'm not good enough. That I've never been good enough. That everything I've built—the career, the family, the life—it's all been a performance. A con. And someday everyone's going to figure out that I don't actually know what I'm doing."

"Imposter syndrome."

"Is that what they call it?" He almost smiled, but it came out wrong. "I just call it the truth. Thirty-two years of faking competence. Thirty-one years of faking being a good husband. Twenty-nine years of faking being a good father. At some point, you'd think the faking would become real. But it doesn't. It just becomes more elaborate."

"You don't believe you're competent?"

"I believe I'm good at looking competent. There's a difference."

Ms. Vance wrote something on her pad. The scratch of pen on paper seemed very loud in the silence that followed.

"That's a heavy burden to carry," she said. "Feeling like a fraud for thirty years."

"You get used to it. Like anything else."

"Do you? Get used to it?"

Dale considered the question. Did he? Or did the weight just become so familiar that he'd forgotten what it felt like to stand up straight?

"I don't know," he said. "I don't remember what it felt like before."

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Q41. "Thirty-two years in this industry. What does the work mean to you?"

"Everything." The word came out before he could consider it, raw and immediate. "It means—it's who I am. The work is the only thing I've ever been sure of. The only thing I knew I could do."

"Knew? Past tense?"

"The past eleven months have—" He stopped, recalibrated. "They've shaken that certainty. When you can't find anyone willing to hire you, you start to wonder if you were ever as good as you thought you were. Maybe I was just lucky. Right place, right time, for thirty-two years. And now the luck's run out."

"You said earlier you don't believe in luck."

"I said I didn't. Maybe I'm changing my mind."

Ms. Vance was quiet for a moment, regarding him with that patient, colorless gaze. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead. The water stain sat on the ceiling, that ugly brown shape that seemed to pulse at the edge of his vision.

"What would you be," she asked, "if you weren't a warehouse man? If you'd never gone into distribution?"

"I don't know. I've never thought about it."

"Think about it now."

Dale tried. He reached back past the thirty-two years, past the loading docks and the inventory systems and the endless shuffle of product from point A to point B. What had he wanted, before he'd wanted this? What had the boy he'd been imagined for the man he'd become?

"My father worked warehouses," he said slowly. "Before the tobacco jobs, even. His father too, I think. It was just—it was what we did. What men like us did. You didn't ask what you wanted to be. You asked what was hiring."

"But if you could have wanted something. If wanting had been an option."

"I—" He stopped. The question was strange, disorienting. Like being asked what color the sky would be if it wasn't blue. "I don't know. Maybe—I used to draw. When I was a kid. Nothing serious, just sketching. Cars, mostly. I thought maybe I could design things someday. But that was—that was a kid's dream. Not something people like me actually did."

"Why not?"

"Because—" The words tangled in his throat. "Because dreaming was for people who could afford to fail. We couldn't afford to fail. There was no safety net. You worked or you didn't eat. You didn't get to wonder what you might have been."

"Do you wonder now?"

"Sometimes. Late at night, when I can't sleep." He looked down at his hands, the age spots and the ghost calluses. "I wonder what would have happened if I'd tried. Taken the risk. But then I think about Melissa, about Linda, about the mortgage and the bills and the life we built. And I know I made the right choice. The responsible choice."

"But?"

"But nothing. I made the choice. I lived with it. That's all there is."

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Q42. "Who are you when you're not working?"

The question hit him like a physical blow. Simple words, ordinary question, but it opened a void in his chest that he hadn't known was there.

"I don't—" He started, stopped. Started again. "I don't know how to answer that."

"Why not?"

"Because I'm always working. Or looking for work. Or thinking about work. Or—" He spread his hands, helpless. "There's no 'when I'm not working.' There's just working and failing to work. That's the whole spectrum."

"What do you do on weekends? Evenings? When the warehouse is closed and you're at home?"

"I—" He tried to think. Weekends. Evenings. The hours that weren't defined by labor. What did he do with them? "I watch TV. Help Linda with things around the house. I used to—I used to work on the car, when we had a car worth working on. Now I just—I don't know. I exist. I wait for Monday."

"That sounds empty."

"It is empty." The admission came out raw, unvarnished. "I've built my whole life around work, and now that the work is gone, I don't know who I am. I don't have hobbies. I don't have friends—not real friends, just coworkers who stopped calling when I stopped being useful. I don't have—" He took a breath. "I don't have a self. Just a function. And when the function isn't needed anymore—"

He stopped. The room seemed to be pressing in on him, the walls closer than they'd been, the ceiling lower. The water stain loomed in his peripheral vision, that spreading brown shape that seemed larger every time he looked at it.

"You're more than a function, Dale."

"Am I?" He looked at Ms. Vance, at her patient face, her colorless eyes. "What am I, then? What's left when you strip away the work? A husband who doesn't know his wife anymore. A father whose daughter doesn't need him. A son whose father died without ever hearing the words he needed to hear." He spread his hands. "What's left? What's the core of me, underneath all the roles?"

"That's what I'm asking you."

"I don't know." The words came out cracked, broken. "I've been asking myself that for eleven months. Every morning when I wake up and there's nowhere to go. Every night when I lie in bed wondering what the point is. I keep looking for something—some part of me that exists outside the work, outside the roles. And I can't find it. There's nothing there. Just—just empty space where a person should be."

Ms. Vance was still. Absolutely still, in that way she had. The pen hadn't moved. She wasn't taking notes.

"Thank you, Dale," she said quietly. "That's very honest."

"Is it?" He laughed, and the laugh sounded strange to his own ears—thin, reedy, not quite his. "Or is it just pathetic? Fifty-four years old and I don't know who I am. I've spent my whole life avoiding the question, and now that I can't avoid it anymore, I don't have an answer."

"Not having an answer isn't the same as being pathetic. It means you're asking a hard question. Most people never ask it at all."

"Maybe they're smarter than me."

"Or maybe they're more afraid."

Dale was silent. The headache pulsed behind his eyes. The room was cold—had it gotten colder? He couldn't tell anymore. He'd been sitting here for—how long? He glanced at his watch.

The display showed 10:47 AM.

Nearly two hours since he'd sat down. It felt like longer. It felt like he'd been in this room for days.

"I think," Ms. Vance said, "we should take this conversation deeper. We've talked about your career, your family, your identity. Now I'd like to talk about the things you've failed to do. The promises you've broken. The times you've let people down."

The door was behind him. He could feel it there, that patient presence. All he had to do was stand up. Thank her for her time. Walk out.

The thought rose and fell like a wave. Here and then gone.

"Okay," he said. "Let's talk about that."

Ms. Vance smiled. Something in the smile was different now—warmer, more intimate. Like a door opening onto a room he couldn't quite see.

"Good," she said. "Then let's continue."