The Self-Made Stranger

Daniil grew up in Siberia, in a town he described as having two things in it: a factory and a prison. By the time he was a young man, most of his childhood friends were dead — drugs, mostly. He got out. He came to Miami, built a career in the alternative-health field doing marketing, and made, by any reasonable measure, a good life.

He came to see me because the good life had a ceiling on it. However hard he pushed, his income would climb to a certain point and stop, as though it had hit glass.

We talked, and one phrase kept surfacing. He had, he told me more than once, cut himself off from his past. From Siberia, from the factory town, from the friends he had buried, from all of it. He said it the way a man reports a sound decision wisely made.

And it was, in part. There was a great deal back there that any sane person would want to leave behind. But as he talked I began to hear the size of the cut. He had not pruned away the painful parts of his history. He had severed the whole root system. And a man cut off from his own story is also cut off from everything in that story that made him who he is — the nerve, the cunning, the flat refusal to die in that town. He had thrown all of it out together.

You cannot get more of yourself by disowning yourself. That was the ceiling.

So I took him inside, and I built him a factory. Not the factory from the town — his own. An inner one, and in it he was not a worker. He was the foreman. I walked him through the door and told him the place was his to inspect, and that the workers were waiting to speak with him.

He went down the line. Here was someone who had been on shift far too long and badly needed a rest. Here was someone trying to do skilled work with broken tools and dead machinery, who needed only a little help to do it well again. Here was someone long overdue for a promotion. He spoke with each of them, one by one. Every one of these workers was a part of himself — including the parts he had disavowed, the ones he had left behind in the snow. And not one of them had turned on him. They were loyal. They had been loyal the whole time, waiting for the foreman to finally walk in. As he went down the line, they were cheering for him.

He sat down and had dinner with them — the owner of the place, surrounded by the people who keep it running, respected by every one of them. The kind of scene that usually only happens in the movies. Then he walked back out the way he had come in. He came up from the trance in tears.

I have heard from him since. The change held, and it showed up exactly where he could least afford a ceiling: in the deals he closes now, in the way he carries himself into a room, in how he feels about the life he has built. He had spent years believing he had to keep the past buried in order to stay strong. What actually made him strong had been down there in the dark the whole time, on his payroll, waiting only to be acknowledged.