✦ On who you are without the performance: 014
Photo by Allec Gomes on Unsplash
You have been performing for so long that somewhere along the way the performance stopped feeling like a costume and started feeling like a self. The accommodating one. The capable one. The one who holds it together, who reads the room before she enters it, who knows instinctively what version of herself each situation requires and produces it on demand with a fluency so practiced it no longer feels like effort. You forgot it was work because work eventually becomes reflex. You forgot it was a mask because masks worn long enough start to feel like a face. And the terrifying thing - the thing that sits at the center of the late diagnosis like a quiet, patient bomb - is not the discovering that you were masking. It is the discovering that you are not entirely sure who was doing the masking. You have worn so many calibrated versions of yourself for so many different rooms that the original, the unedited, the one who existed before she learned that existing as she was would cost her - that woman can feel like a stranger. Or worse, like a rumor. Something you half remember from childhood, from the moments before you understood that the world was going to require some modification of you before it would agree to hold you.
Who you are without the performance is not someone you have to become. She is someone you have to stop leaving.
She has been there the entire time - underneath the competence and the composure and the careful social engineering of every interaction - waiting with a patience that should frankly be awarded some kind of medal. She is the one who surfaces at 2am when the performance finally clocks out. She is the one who cries at things that can’t be explained to people who need explanations. She is the one who felt everything too much and too deeply and in too many directions at once and learned, very young, to treat that fullness as a liability rather than the extraordinary navigational instrument it actually is. Getting to know her is not a project of self improvement. It is not a rebrand or a reinvention or a return to some idealized former self. It is something quieter and more radical than any of that. It is the daily practice of catching yourself mid-performance and asking - gently, without judgment, with the kind of curiosity you would offer a woman you loved - is this me, or is this the version of me that learned to survive? And then, slowly, on the days when the answer is safe enough and the room is small enough and the cost feels manageable enough, choosing her instead. The unperformed one. The unedited one. The one who is, it turns out, so much more interesting than any version you ever constructed for someone else’s comfort.
