Life is not a performance

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I remember a time when I had no concerns about what other people thought of me. My brother and I would explore the forest behind our property, pretending to be Jedi fighting an army of droids. We would set traps for one another in the forest — digging holes in the ground and covering them with sticks, or bending over small trees so that they would be sent swinging when someone walked by. In retrospect, that was probably a little bit dangerous. I’m surprised neither of us broke any bones in childhood, or seriously injured one another. But we were playing. There was not a thought in our little minds about self-image, reputation, or responsibilities. For those few years from about five years old to about nine, I spent my free time living in a world of imagination.
And then as I started getting older, the memories of playing in my backyard start to fade away, and they’re replaced by one thing — school. As I was exploring the forest with my brother I had no concerns about popularity because there was nobody to compare myself to. I never cared what my brother thought of me, or feared that his perception of me would change, and so I never really felt anxiety at that stage of my life. There were no social fears for me, until I was in the classroom noticing the social groups that were forming.
Instead of living my life without any concern for what others thought of me, it became my main concern. There is no other logical alternative in school, because your popularity largely determines your quality of life during those years. If you’re not popular you don’t get invited to parties, you sometimes don’t have anyone to talk to at lunch, and your after-school activities usually involve a textbook. That might get you better grades in the long run, but it doesn’t make you feel good about yourself. It fosters this sense that you don’t belong. And when the bell rings for lunch sometimes you don’t know what to do with yourself.
I found my way into those popular social groups, but I never really felt like I was a part of them. They would form their circles at lunchtime, but I never really knew what to say. I didn’t want to interrupt everyone else, all of the people who always had something to contribute to the conversation. So I just sort of stood there for a while, just so I could feel like I was one of those popular kids. And you might even say that I was popular in high school — but I didn’t feel like it. No matter how much time I spent hanging around that lunchtime clique, I didn’t feel like I was a part of the social hierarchy they had formed.
It wasn’t until I found myself in university that I started to discover my social self. Instead of being preoccupied with social groups, I was focused on getting my degree. And over the course of my years in school I started to form some lasting friendships. If someone didn’t want to be my friend, or didn’t want to date me, that was fine, there were plenty of other people on campus to spend my time with. It’s almost as if I had come full circle again, returning a little bit closer to that original state of just experiencing life, without the burden of social expectation.
The vestiges of adolescence never seem to leave us, however. At seventeen still felt uncomfortable in conversations. I had the social skills necessary to keep a discussion going, but I always had this fear in the back of my mind — that I would suddenly stop saying the right things. It was this knawing fear that I didn’t really know how to speak to others, that every successful conversation was merely a fluke. This imposter syndrome got so bad that I would leave conversations when it was going well, because success scared me — if things were going well, then it might change in the opposite direction.
This started to really bother me. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with my thought process. It seemed like it was an issue with my confidence. I thought maybe I didn’t have enough certainty in my abilities to socialize. That explanation didn’t make sense, though. I had close friendships at the time, and I had managed to socialize well enough to have a few romantic relationships as well. So why was I backing out of conversations when things were going well?
I spent countless hours writing about my fears, trying to solve this issue in my head. I had to figure out this imposter syndrome that I was experiencing because it was spilling into other areas of my life. I would write a few good paragraphs for a university paper and then get afraid that the rest wouldn’t stack up. On the soccer field, I would make a few nice passes and then choke the next play, because I was paralyzed by the fear of making a mistake.
It took me another months to discover the fault in my thinking.
I was obsessed with confidence. And convinced that confidence meant being certain in everything you do. I was viewing everything in my life as a performance that I had to keep up, lest the whole thing fall apart.
Life is not a performance. It’s an experience.
The things you say are not a performative act you need to keep up, they are an expression of what you think, and what you feel. If there is no performance to maintain, then the only thing left is you. And that is what will show itself. It might not be perfect, and you’ll make a few mistakes, but the important thing is that you’re being your authentic self.
There is a tremendous weight that lifts off your shoulders when you realize this. The years spent trying to keep up a performance are wrought with anxiety because you’re afraid that you can’t keep this streak of success going. But when you let go of that idea, and allow yourself to be you, in all of your imperfections, the pressure suddenly falls away. There is no longer the burden of expectation that you’ve put on yourself — there is just you.
That’s not to say that you’re not progressing in your ability, or ironing out some of those imperfections. It might seem like a terrifying idea at first — let you, be you. What if that “you” isn’t good enough? Or what if that version of you is going to make mistakes? That was my initial fear when I first considered letting go of my performance mindset. If I let go of micromanaging every aspect of my life, will that lead to worse outcomes? Am I going to say something stupid in a conversation because I wasn’t trying to control everything coming out of my mouth?
It’s quite the opposite. If you let go of performance, it has this paradoxical effect of making you better at what you do. It brings you closer to your true abilities, instead of hiding behind this falsified, micromanaged veil of skill that you were parading around.
The more authentic you are, the less pressure you have on yourself, and the more positively others are likely going to perceive you. People can always sense when you’re trying to put on a performance. And even if they can’t, your periodical bouts of performance anxiety make you back out before you start making mistakes, and the chances of maintaining any lasting friendship or relationship are now gone. It is certainly possible to maintain a performative act for months, or even years, but eventually it becomes tiresome. The burden of having to keep it up is starting to get painful. And you are just craving to let go, and allow yourself to just be.
If you’re an authentic version of yourself, there is nothing to maintain, nothing to expect, and no pressure on yourself to perform. What you say is an expression of who you are, what you feel, and how you view the world. That is authenticity in its purest form. And it feels like you’ve been freed from something, this imaginary performance prison you’ve found yourself in for most of your life.
It starts in high school when you had to say the right joke in the group to get them to laugh. And you started saying to yourself: I need to say the right thing next time to get a laugh again. So the cycle continues, until you’ve spent years of your adult life doing the exact same thing, trying to get laughs, portray yourself as high-status on social media, or pretend like you’re perfect. It’s all a lie, and it’s a product of our obsession with what others think about us. If you truly didn’t care what others thought of you, then you would have been yourself from the beginning. But instead, life becomes this decade-long process of undoing the confusion of adolescence, the development of a perspective that is counter-productive and based on controlling your way through life.
There is nothing to control. None of us have absolute control of what we say, do, or decide — it is always on some level a product of genes and experience. That might be a frightening prospect, because if you don’t have control over every aspect of yourself, what might you say in a social situation? Would you say something cruel to another person because you’ve let go of that control? No. In fact, becoming an authentic version of yourself will likely make you more kind, because you’re not hiding behind a false version of yourself, and acting out of insecurity. The number one reason people hurt each other in social relationships is insecurity. If you’ve let go of micromanaging your personality, there is only authenticity left, and insecurity has a hard time coexisting with it.
I’m concerned that as adults, the majority of us have forgotten what we learned in early childhood. Instead of just experiencing the world, we’ve become preoccupied with where we fit in it. Instead of allowing our personalities to show themselves, with both the good and the bad, we’ve internalized an idea of how we should be, and that idea is something unattainable. It is an ideal of perfection, of living up to the expectations of everyone around us that what we do and say should be flawless.
As I was slicing down those stinging nettles in my backyard, saving the universe from their wrath, do you think I was concerned about what others thought about me? No. There was not a thought in my head except what I was doing, and the enjoyment of the moment.
That is the place we all need to get back to. That freedom to explore, to discover, to just be. Instead, we’ve restricted ourselves to what we think others will like. We might want to express our true thoughts, dress the way we want, and post a true expression of ourselves on social media, but there’s always that voice in the back of your head questioning what other people are going to think of it. Will it get as many likes if we are authentic?
None of those concerns really matter. If people don’t like a true expression of yourself, then they don’t like you. If you have to change yourself in order to fit into a group, then they don’t truly like you — they like a version of you that you’ve micromanaged and maintained. The moment you release yourself from your obsession with performance is when you find out what others really think of you.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t follow social rules, or dress nicely on a night out, but it’s simply a matter of how much we’ve invested in the opinions of others. It’s impossible not to care what others think unless you have some form of psychopathy. There is little chance you’re going to reach a place of complete comfort in who you are, to the point where you have no care in the world about any social perception of you. Nor would you ever want to reach that place, if it were possible. We care about what others think because we want others in our lives. But what drives others away from us, and prevents us from having any measure of mental peace, is becoming a curated projection of ourselves, instead of our true selves.
It’s probably not possible for us to return to the mental peace of when we were in our early childhood. The reality of having a developed prefrontal cortex is that you tend to overthink things. There are far more complex problems, thoughts, and feelings as you get older, and that’s not exactly something you can escape (especially not in your 20's). But how much more enjoyable would our lives be if we could just stop trying to live up to an idea of how we think we should be? How much less anxiety would we all have if we stopped being so preoccupied with our social image?
If we could all just rekindle a fraction of the curiosity, wonder, exploration, and joy of being a kid, then the world would change. But instead, we’ve all placed ourselves in this self-induced state of anxiety and worry, being concerned about things that don’t even matter. You’re not going to care on your deathbed about what people thought of you in high school, or how many likes you got on your Instagram photo in 2021. The adventures are what you’re going to remember — those moments of unexpected spontaneity will live with you until your last moment. That is what we should be focused on creating.