I’ve often thought about performing as pretending to be someone you’re not. Becoming an entirely different person in attempt to attune to the emotional climate of a room. Or even trying on an alter ego socially or in a pinch in an awkward moment. I’ve thought about performance only in the realm of extremes.
It turns out, performing is a sneaky little habit.
It can look like saying yes when you want to say no.
Saying “I’m fine” when you’re absolutely not.
But also saying, “ugh, everything sucks” when actually.. life feels really fucking good right now, but everyone else is complaining so you feel weird about being the happy one.
Performing can look like making yourself incredibly busy because “I’m busy” feels like a more acceptable excuse than, “I just don’t want to go.”
Or acting super low maintenance because not needing anything feels safer than asking someone to take care of you.
And, a big one for me, performing can look like treating every hard season like a problem you should have figured out how to optimize your way out of by now. Because things being hard has to be a sign that your life is misaligned.
For the longest time, I didn’t see any of the above as performing. I thought it was accommodating… simply, a part of life. I thought it was the responsible way to be. I thought I was nothing more than a self-aware mom seeking ultimate alignment in my life, dodging life-is-hard-bullets left and right. I thought it was noble to be one of those I’ll-do-anything-for-you-friends and I’ll-sacrifice-all-of-my-life-force-for-my-kids type of moms. I thought these were just inherent parts of my personality.
Come to find out, I was performing goodness. Morphing myself into something palatable. And keeping myself incredibly small in order to not get my shit on anybody.
There’s a cost to all of this, though. Because when you abandon yourself in enough tiny moments, eventually your body starts screaming at you in ways you can’t ignore.
You start fantasizing about another life. Another version of yourself you know you can become but just can’t.quite.reach. You reach for a fresh new routine. A distraction. You try to convince yourself that if you just had more time, more freedom, and if you were just in an easier phase of life with less responsibility, things would be different.
But I’m starting to think that the circumstances of your life aren’t the problem. Maybe it’s the version of yourself you’ve been performing.
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Becoming a parent shined a spotlight on all of the tiny ways I was performing, but had accepted as a way of life, a right of passage, even. Into the perception of goodness that was needed in order for me to feel like someone who was worth being around.
It was scary when I saw how all of these little things compounded into something massive. How I had become an expert at shape-shifting. How giving myself away was my normal. How obsessed I had become with displaying this ease-filled existence, like I had found the secret keys to life that everyone else was searching for.
But all of that came tumbling down when I became a mom. Because with less to give to all the meaningless fluff that had once occupied my energy, I had to start getting incredibly honest about how I actually wanted to live my own life.
What do I want to say no to?
What do I want to stop apologizing for?
What do I actually need if I stop making my needs too much?
What do I genuinely want to fill my days with?
What do I keep trying to make easier because somewhere along the way I decided hard = wrong?
When I started looking more closely at my own life, I realized some of the things I had been doing in the name of keeping the peace, being a good person, being productive, or living an “aligned” life were the exact things making me feel the most disconnected from my self.
Little by little, I started picking apart and peeling away all the layers of my own performance. These are the five places where that work has changed everything:
I stopped pretending I’m okay… or not okay
I stopped apologizing for the season I’m in
I stopped pretending that being busy was a noble thing
I stopped trying to be low maintenance with my needs
I stopped treating “hard” as evidence that I was living a misaligned life
I’ve dug into each and every one of these below. This is not a clean, pretty, nicey-nice reflection on the above. It’s a full on declaration, with real life examples of how these things are showing up for me, what I’m actively doing to break the pattern, and the hard honest truth about what it takes to look yourself in the mirror, take responsibility, and shift from one way of being to the opposite end of the spectrum.
It’s not all pretty, and it certainly doesn’t contain some magic formula. And I especially didn’t hold back with number 5.
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