The Myth of Normal 164

expected social roles and take on the characteristics necessary to do so, no matter the cumulative cost to our well-being. I first met Ulf Caap about fourteen years ago. Then vice president of human resources for IKEA North America, Ulf seemed to have everything going for him. And yet this internationally respected business leader had sought me out as part of a personal journey born of deep existential dissatisfaction. He had been visited by a most uncomfortable realization: his well-compensated life—a runaway success by our society’s “normal” gauges —and the everyday way of being it demanded of him, amounted, as he recalled, to “a sham, an illusion, a fake . . . There was virtually none of me in it.” Another wildly successful person by societal standards, the writer-actor Lena Dunham, of Girls[*] fame, said something similar in our interview. In a rehab program for substance addiction, she had been assigned the exercise of writing down her own values. “I realized,” she said, “that I could not think of a single value that did not belong to somebody else.” Ulf has since become a friend and sometime collaborator: we have codesigned and led workshops for high-level executives who share that same sense of their authentic selves and their work personas being at diametric odds. I don’t mean merely that they leave their true thoughts, feelings, desires, and needs at the office door, only to retrieve them at day’s end as one would a parked car. For the “sham” to be sustainable, these authentic parts of the self must be placed in long-term storage and the key misplaced. “I would negate my personal values to make a success,” Ulf admitted. Now in his midseventies and the very picture of health, he is convinced his self-suppression and disconnect were draining his life energy: “I recognized that my steps going to work were not so light as they used to be. I was being drawn toward illness.” Ulf has had the good sense—and, he would agree, the privilege—to explore and transcend his alienation. “I spent forty years in insanity,” he said, looking back. “My focus was ninety-nine percent on what success looked like in society and in the corporation I worked for. I had no focus whatsoever on what I needed. If I did what the corporation required, I would be successful.” He could not have provided a more precise illustration of the insight that the