Page 20 - Demo

“work clothes” and holding a hammer in my father’s oversized baseball cap. I was his beloved. He taught me so much—how to frame a door, sheetrock a living room, lay new flooring, and everything in between to changing outlets, washing windows, and the importance (and I mean importance) of cleaning your paint brush immediately after you’re done painting with it. Like a disciple learns intimately from his teacher, so too was I yearning to walk in the same prints of my dad’s shoes. But slowly over time, this dynamic began to change.
I don’t remember when I bought the lie that my identity was rooted in my work, but as I look back, I now have the lens to see that I wasn’t just working to get the job done. I wanted not only my dad, but also my friends to see that I was capable of doing things on my own. And what came with this sense of doing things on my own led to a flaming arrow to the heart that I accepted as being on my own.
I was looking for two things: validation and love.
I didn’t have words for it at the time, but since I was that little boy going to work, I always had the sentence “Do I have what it takes?” often subconsciously said in the back of my head most days at the job site. So, there I was replacing toilets, or prepping floors for new carpet to be laid down. I often felt inadequate or behind in most of the projects I was set out to do. Still, I was able for the most part to put my head down and get the job down and claim it's who I was by the end of a hard day’s work.