When Performance Becomes Love

As a child you don’t think about it. You’re curious. You search for recognition, warmth, your place in this world. You’re not yet reflective and when something comes from the outside, a compliment, a look, a “look what he can do”, it feels like arriving. At your place in this world.

Sport. An instrument. Good grades. Look, he’s good. Look what he can do already. At his age. I’m proud of you. Be proud of yourself. What no one means badly still sets something off. It’s right to praise. But something builds up, quietly, layer by layer. I please. So I am loved. So I have a place in this world. Praise becomes recognition becomes love becomes ego becomes more performance. Performance becomes love. Control becomes safety. Function becomes closeness.

Where you aren’t that good, but pretend to be, it gets complicated. When success doesn’t come, you tell yourself it doesn’t bother you. But it bothers you. And that’s where it starts: disappointment from failure. Not because the success is missing, but because the love disappears with it.

That’s how being human works. Whoever recognises that in themselves is definitely more free.

At some point you’re in conversations and already rushing to the next. You love and you plan at the same time. You take care of your family and the company at the same time. You listen and you calculate at the same time. You’re awake. Always. Everywhere. But are you really there?

When a moment comes in which nothing happens, no calm arises. Emptiness arises. And you confuse emptiness with danger. So you fill it. With work, with stimuli, with the next idea. The next proof that this is your place in this world. You keep filling until no room is left. For nothing and for no one. And least of all for yourself.

A child looks at you and expects something. A response. Criticism. Best of all, praise. In its look there is fear or hope. Do you see that? Or are you full of your own thoughts from the job, with your own problems, and you only glance back and put on a face from the standard selection of reactions that you’ve set aside, because the child was content and quiet afterwards.

I love you. Three words. They mean: it doesn’t matter what you do. Good or bad. You can judge that yourself. It’s always ok to be the way you are. I love you. Always.

But when a child instead only ever gets praise and criticism, it drowns out the inner voice. Then it looks outside for what can only grow inside. And at some point an adult is sitting there who functions, delivers, is strong and no longer knows what their own voice is telling them.

I wasn’t there yesterday. And if I keep going like this, I won’t be there tomorrow either. And the question isn’t whether you come back, but whether you were ever there. The question is: Were you ever with yourself, the way you want to be with your child?