the masks we wear and what’s underneath them
performing vs. existing
I’ve tried a few times to write about the nature of performing: of doing things because we think we should do them, instead of because they feel true to us. It’s a delicate subject, because knowing whether you are doing something for you or for others is so incredibly personal. But once you recognize that you are performing—portraying a character that doesn’t feel like you—it wears on you constantly.
Performing often manifests itself in us making high level life decisions (like: I should follow this career path) that trickle down into our every day existence (like: I suddenly have to act a certain way every day to ascend on that career path). Performing can be as granular as changing the way you talk around someone, to as vast as living an entire life behind the mask of who you think you should be—following a path more full of obligation and “should” than sincerity and truth.
I was recently reminded of something I said in a podcast interview a few months back, about how people often find it odd that I chose to pursue writing despite having an engineering degree and working in a somewhat prestigious field, with lots of “promise” ahead of me in my career (this is the episode linked at the time stamp of that answer). There’s a long answer I could give—and do give there!—explaining how and why I got the conviction to do writing despite all of this optionality and “promise”, but the short answer is: going down the path I was on just didn’t feel like me. It felt like I was acting out the decisions of the person I thought I should be instead of simply being who I am. Because the truth was that despite all the effort and time and dedication I put into setting myself up for this life that I “should” desire, I didn’t really want it. I just wanted to write—to follow what felt uniquely right to me.
This seems so earnestly puzzling to people that I find myself transforming this simple concept (I chose what felt true to me instead of what others thought I should do) to fit through such complex mental acrobatic hoops that I get lost myself, thinking: why is it so odd that I choose not to wear a mask every day? I eventually realized that the reason it’s hard to understand this choice is because most people are wearing masks for so long that they forget what it is like to exist without one.
performing vs. existing
Once you’ve been operating from a place of “should” for long enough instead of a place of inner alignment and truth (i.e. making decisions based on extrinsic motivators instead of intrinsic motivators), it’s as if you forget how to be yourself. You become used to the opposite: a default of performing. This breeds the belief that life, and particularly work, should feel out of alignment in some way. That operating in a state of obligation and mild suffering is normal, nothing to think twice about. But I challenge that notion. I am of the camp that you should get more than just capital from what you spend your life doing. The return should not be so one dimensional. You should get something else: expansiveness, growth in a direction you are genuinely interested in, a sense of becoming someone that excites you.
Performing is quite an intangible, personal concept (no one can truly tell if you are representing yourself authentically but you), but these prompts have helped me zoom out and deduce when I am in a phase of performing, even when I’ve gotten so used to it that I hardly notice I’m doing it anymore:
What feels hard when it should feel easy?
What are you doing because you feel like you should be doing it instead of because you genuinely want to?
What takes time to emotionally recover from because it feels like you’re “faking it”?
What simple tasks that don’t take a lot of actual effort involve a strange amount of emotional labour? Or: what feels tiring that shouldn’t?
If no one cared that you did this, would you still do it?
The exhaustion you experience from performing is not the same as exhaustion from over-exertion. You can work day and night on a project you’re excited about and not feel as tired as you would after an hour of mindlessly inputting numbers into an excel spreadsheet. The former energizes you: you get something from it that transcends its outcome. You are bringing your ideas to life. The work is inherently energizing. Despite the effort it requires, the task itself doesn’t drain you, because you are getting something more sacred than money or external validation: the sense that you are becoming a version of yourself you actually want to become.
The exhaustion you get from performing even the simplest tasks wears on you differently. It’s as if your life force energy starts declining, rejecting the tasks you are employing it to complete in an attempt to show you that you are focused on the wrong thing.
taking off the mask
Living without a mask is similar to how we exist in childhood: unconcerned by how our choices are perceived, following only what feels right to us instead of what others think is right for us. Once you exist for long enough without a mask, putting one on takes so much energy that it hardly ever feels worth it. I think this is generally good, but it occasionally makes things difficult. There are times when I wish it was easier to fake it, where I wish I could feign interest or engagement more easily. But life is full of trade-offs. If you get good at one thing, you’re probably getting worse at the opposite of that thing unless you are actively managing your abilities in both. This is the nature of polarities.
By getting better at selecting for things that don’t require me to put on a mask, I’ve gotten much worse at being in scenarios that require me to wear one. I have a lower tolerance for people who make it uncomfortable for others to be themselves. I am less inclined towards opportunities that require me to mute qualities I value within myself. I am more attuned to when I am forcing myself to do something because others think it is the right choice, instead of choosing what feels right to me.
This also has me thinking about what it’s like to experience the opposite: when you get so good at performing that you essentially forget how to exist as your true self. Being behind a mask all the time is tense and exhausting. It requires you to always be thinking about how you should act, what you should do. It’s like translating your thoughts into a different language before speaking them out loud. It takes energy, keeping you from relaxing into who you are. Instead of flowing, you are ebbing all the time. And eventually, you learn to adjust to that constant ebb, to normalize the inner resistance it generates. You begin to think that being tense, alert, distrustful of your own instincts is normal. That being in a chronic state of performing is the way you should be.
The key to getting out of that state is to (1) realize that you are performing, and (2) realize that you don’t need to be—that performing is not a necessary part of existing: that every day doesn’t need to be a painful struggle you tolerate simply because you’re used to it. You’re allowed to decide how you want to live. It doesn’t need to hurt. But you can’t cultivate an existence that doesn’t hurt until you believe yourself that life doesn’t need to be painful. That belief allows you to see a different choice, and seeing that choice brings you closer to making it. If you think that living needs to hurt, that if you’re not performing you’re doing something wrong, you’ll only ever look for (and thus find) opportunities that require you to perform and suffer.
Our beliefs perpetuate through our patterns. It is up to us to notice our patterns, uncover the deep-rooted beliefs that inform them, and rewire those beliefs to say something else that is more aligned with how we want to live. Like: life can be fun, I can feel good every day, I can be successful while being myself. Living doesn’t need to be a performance.
the puzzle of self-expression
It’s surprising and, quite honestly, confusing to people when you do something that prioritizes self-expression over performance if they are someone who spends most of their time in a mask. Because honouring your genuine self vs. acting in favour of what others think are two completely different ways of being. And once you get too deep into either (performing who you think you should be vs. existing as your true self) it’s hard to understand those who do the opposite. If you’ve been performing for too long, you forget what it’s like to make decisions from your true self, and because of that, you don’t understand people who do. And when you lead from your true self, you can’t understand people who perform every day. Hence why most of society never understands artists: they don’t know what it looks like to exist as their true selves, unencumbered by the need to perform, so when they see honest self-expression, they call it crazy.
finding what’s true to you
Your values are a reflection of your authentic self: they determine what you want to maximize and minimize in life. When you squirm with discomfort at something you or another person has done, it probably violates one of your values. One way to determine what is true to you is to simply eliminate anything that feels like a violation of your values and then see what’s left. In my case, one of my values is self-expression, so I want to minimize performing. I find the things I am most likely to avoid in life are the things that make me feel like I am faking it*—like I need to put on a mask to do them. As my sense of self has strengthened, the energetic cost of performing has grown. As my taste grows more distinct, my tolerance for what doesn’t feel right contracts. It’s as though learning how to self-express teaches you to avoid instances where cannot be yourself, because you know how good it feels to exist without a mask on and trading that to appease others no longer feels worth it.
*I think there are 2 types of “faking it” so let me be clear about which one I am referring to. When I say faking it, I do NOT mean faking it by acting more confident than you actually are to help you do something that you genuinely want to do (I am in favour of confidence-embellishment when it is in alignment!). I DO mean the kind of faking it where you are inventing a persona that doesn’t exist because you feel like you need to act a certain way to fit in somewhere. The former helps you expand into a greater version of yourself. The latter contracts you into a smaller one.
developing performance-avoidance
It has been a while since I was in a phase of chronic performing. I’ve gotten so used to being myself that I feel unimaginably sensitive to anywhere that asks me to put on a mask. It’s a reaction close to disgust—a deep internal sense of “this isn’t right” that I find hard to shake. But I remember being in a place not that long ago where I wasn’t even aware that I was in a chronic state of performing, completely oblivious to the fact that I had a mask on at all, unaware of what I looked like—felt like!—without one.
And now that I’ve existed without a mask, I have gained access to parts of myself I didn’t know existed. Parts of myself that have flourished, blossomed, come alive in the space created by having the ability to tune into myself, to express myself freely. But I know what it was like to have none of this, to have no idea that my existence only allowed for a fraction of myself to come through.
I want to explore how you can tell when you are performing in the hopes that through examining your own life and the parts of yourself it does (or does not) activate, you can inch yourself towards a state where you are performing less and existing more. But to get there, it takes noticing when you are not there. It takes realizing that you are acting out a character you’ve gotten so used to playing that you hardly realize you’re acting at all. It’s like that Kurt Vonnegut line:
“Be careful who you pretend to be, because we become who we pretend to be.”
I think most advice around ‘finding yourself’ really just comes down to noticing whether you are expanding or contracting. Whether you are getting to know more of yourself or forgetting parts of yourself. You can tell exactly where you should or should not be based on how it feels to you—based on the simple question: do you feel safe enough to be yourself here?
Our internal compass includes pretty much all of the factors we try to measure out and intellectualize to help us make choices when it tells us whether something feels right or not. It is pretty extraordinary that the most instructive signal is just: how do you feel doing this over a long enough period of time? Better or worse? Expansive or contractive? Excited about the future or dreading it? Because if you don’t feel good, if you don’t feel like you are blossoming, then what’s the point? Even if it “checks all the boxes,” why would you opt into something that forces you to collapse your sense of self as it erodes the most interesting parts of you?
The world is more beautiful when people express themselves in it. It is richer. And the feeling of expressing what is inside you, of bringing your ideas to life, brings out such an intense sense of aliveness that hardly anything can match it. I want more people to know that they have access to that within them, if they are willing to take off their mask and activate what is underneath it: themselves.
Allow this to be a reminder to anyone that feels like they have lost touch with the part of themselves that yearns to create and express—the part that feels excited, alive, full of wonder—it is inside you, always ready to be reawakened. You simply need to surround yourself with the people and places that allow you to be yourself. Seek settings that make self-expression feel like the norm. Find pockets where you can take your mask off and expand into the parts of you that want to be seen underneath it. Believe that you can get what you want without needing to fake it. Give yourself permission to stop performing and to instead start existing—and through that existence, watch yourself expand.
Do you resonate with what I write about? Maybe we should work together: If you resonate with the ideas I write about and want to cultivate a life you genuinely enjoy living, where you align your actions with your values, move towards the changes you know you need to make, and consciously harvest the self-knowledge that emerges through that process, send an email to isabel@mindmine.school or DM me on Twitter to explore what working together 1-1 would look like.
You might also like my related pieces on growing pains, self-trust, becoming yourself, on being ready and being selective. Also, please do say hi on Twitter if you enjoyed this! Thank you for reading, and feel free to let me know how this piece landed with you —
holy fuck, i’ve been thinking about this article all day since reading it this morning. such a well crafted and thought out piece. this might just be the final push i’ve been looking for to tell myself it’s ok to quit my job...
This post brings to mind what has gone on in my mother's life. For years she seemed quite career driven and did well in that, but probably there were hints that not everything was great. Lots of stress, short fuse, pain killers every day just to get through life.
Then after a family tragedy she essentially changed over night. Stopped doing work at home, wanted to spend time with family. After retiring she took up drawing, which she always liked but never really spent time on. Now she draws multiple hours per day, and even ended up learning how to do some animations. She also spends a bunch of time cooking new things and learning languages, which she didn't use to do.
She's visibly more happy and far less stressed. If she gets invited to anything that reminds her of the old life she starts having an intense feeling of dread. After seeing the difference first-hand I'm also very reluctant to put a mask on.
Great piece!