Constantly performing

Photo by John Noonan on Unsplash

I see people who don’t make their life into a series of performances as truly privileged. Folks who have allowed themselves to treat their own lens as primary on their activities and their way of being. To be honest, some of us don’t even have a sense of what our lens feels like, so we continue to do what we have always done - borrow the lenses of people we meet and then perform for what we believe will get us the desired reception. And, when that doesn’t come through, we tweak our performances, keeping one eye on the subtle cues we can get from our audience, like a scientist running a controlled experiment in her lab. 

Things seem to run fine, as we don’t even know what we are robbing ourselves of. You see, to know that something is stolen, or missing, you need to have tasted it in the first place. Perhaps, our lens never developed, nor did living through it become our default way of being.

Chronic overwhelm seems to be just a normal aspect of living, the relentless barrage of judgements and berating commentary on self is just how the inner experience is, or worse, it is a desired state as it makes us better - what it really means is it makes us perform better - but we are too enmeshed in the ballet of pleasing to notice this subtle yet, essential difference. 

If we are lucky enough to start noticing this tendency in ourselves, we are met with hundreds of explanations feeding our intellectual analysis - usually essays upon essays on the links to our childhood, our parents’ parenting style, gender norms, etc - and while we eagerly gulp this nectar of information, it doesn’t necessarily translate to altering our default way of being. 

Embodiment is not the job of information, it’s a skill we are often deficient in, and specially in the day and age of information overload, the lack of this skill stands out as we keep drowning in another video, another podcast, another google search. 

Even with all this information, we are at best left with no map to navigate this journey, or worse lured by false promises that yet again take us to adopting someone else’s lens. As a result, we keep giving this up, unless we no longer can continue the performance due to something like a chronic illness. However, some folks can’t draw the curtains till the curtains are drawn on their own life. 

Recognising that performing and pleasing is an intricate part of the tapestry of our being, and finding out that we don’t have an ever-evolving lens of our own are blessings in themselves. But, knowing that we need to stop doing this is of little use when we navigate one of the most complex things we can do as adults - trying to change our defaults, questioning our long-held unexamined perspectives, enabling foundational changes - people call it an identity crisis, I call it creating an identity with conscious awareness for the first time.

My understanding is that those of us tightly gripped in the relentless performance charade also run low on compassion towards self. We find ourselves unable to practice curiosity without it quickly turning into a berating commentary. I believe compassionate curiosity is the starting place towards recovery, or towards the true embodiment of all those teachings coming towards us from different sources.

As I mentioned earlier, you don’t know what you’re missing, even though you have moments of knowing that your inner world is not a peaceful place and that you are not at the centre of your own experiences. It’s worth exploring, it’s worth trusting that there can be another way of existing, even when you were trained otherwise.

It is certainly useful to do an excavation of your past, it gives us valuable nuggets of understanding, and a thread that leads us back to self with increased compassion, but it takes unimaginable courage and faith to drop the performance, go through the period of having no anchor and then build one with love and patience. I wish for that courage and faith to grow in you.

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