You forgot you were performing

Growing up, I was never truly myself.

Pretty much anything I did carried a fear, an anxiety, that I was doing something wrong.

That fear almost always came from what others could possibly say.

And when they did say something, it shook me more than it should have.

I felt its pain more deeply than I ever should have.

So I stopped doing anything apart from what I was told to.

My life was running on someone else’s commands like a puppet performance.

I didn’t know it was possible to even leave the stage.

You learned to suppress parts of yourself long before you understood why.

There is a part of you that has been feeling that pain each time.

The fake smiles. The self-sacrificial niceness. The performance you play to entertain the audience.

Somewhere beneath that performance, a part of you still feels the misalignment.

You became this way for safety, for comfort.

Even when it meant disrespecting yourself.

This is something you’ve been doing long before this moment.

For most people it began the moment the child was told who they were and who they were meant to be.

“Be quiet.”

“Sit still.”

“You’re bad at this.”

These became signals that can still operate years later.

From the parent’s perspective they are disciplining a child in a way that allows them to move through society safely.

But in that process, the child also adapts to those signals.

A child cannot always tell the difference between respectfulness and suppression of expression.

You can grow up storing those same signals and become afraid of expressing yourself.

Walk into a room afraid of saying the wrong thing because speaking in the household required overly careful wording.

Afraid of holding presence because teachers lectured a fidgeting child to sit still at 9 in the morning while your own biology called for movement.

And now you are an adult with those same patterns still running beneath consciousness.

But a part of you is still aware of it.

An intuition that senses when something feels psychologically misaligned.

A lie. A performance. A betrayal of yourself.

That intuition may be one of the few parts of you least shaped by performance.

But trusting it became difficult.

All your life you were taught to override it.

That it was too emotional.

Too loud. Too much. Too undisciplined.

So eventually you learned to silence parts of yourself in order to function more safely within the world around you.

And over time, the performance slowly became identity.

This doesn’t happen all at once, but from years of the same old acting.

That act became a safety mechanism because that’s what people know you for. That’s what people expect.

So now you stay inside those patterns because leaving them comes at a cost.

To no longer perform the role you were taught to play is to risk rejection, isolation, and disapproval.

People are uncomfortable with what is unpredictable.

And authenticity is unpredictable.

It has no script.

No guarantees.

That creates uncertainty.

Somewhere along the way, we were taught that uncertainty meant rejection.

In reality, that was the real you.

Not some convenient script that reacts a certain way to each thing, but an individual with their own perspectives, that can feel all sorts of emotions.

One that can be honest with themselves.

You still hold this version of you, it never left.

Think back to every moment:

When you smiled through something you didn’t believe.

When you laughed when the joke wasn’t funny.

When you said something you didn’t even agree with.

In those moments, something inside you could register that misalignment.

But the body learnt to ignore the soul because the soul is not always convenient.

And eventually the performance happened automatically for safety.

So automatic that you begin wondering which parts of you were truly chosen, and which parts were built through adaptation.

The mask was never the real danger.

Forgetting you were wearing it was.

To remember is to ask how much of the mask you’re still wearing, and who you’re wearing it for.

And it’s not easy by any means.

Awareness, especially in the beginning, is painful.

That pain is a lifetime’s worth of suppression finally being acknowledged.

And the most honest moments usually happen when you are alone with your thoughts.

Take that walk.

Sit on the bench.

Look to the sky.

And have that overdue discussion with yourself.

It’s going to be a long one.

It may even feel pointless at first.

But this may be the only part of the day where you are no longer performing.

-Noah