The Exhaustion of Pretending
Dropping the act and picking up your authentic self ðŸŽ
She dropped a piece of herself. It was an accident - her arms were so full of baggage and pain, she fell. At least, part of her fell. As she hurried along, she didn’t notice a piece of her fell. She couldn’t notice - she just needed to get away.
In the years following, it always felt like something was missing. She looked at other peoples lives and they seemed to be happy, while she felt nothing but a strange emptiness. She tried to recreate the happy lives she saw around her - she worked hard, she went to school, got a well paying job that became her career, and was in a relationship she thought made her the closest to happy she had ever felt. She dutifully gave up carbs in suit, tracked her steps, gave up skinny jeans but not how skinny feels. The more she followed the trend cycle, the dizzier she felt.
And none of it worked.
The strange emptiness grew within her. It seemed the more she did, the busier she was, the more productive she became, the more hollow she felt. It was as if a serrated silver spoon was scraping the edges of her inner being, deepening the echo of her soul. She kept busy because she knew if she slowed down, she would be miserable.
But she had no reason to be. The outer world she had built for herself was full. So full that on certain conspicuous days, she was sure her life would surely suffocate her. Tiptoeing through her hoarded house stacked to the rafters with emotion she couldn’t bring herself to process, each illusion of having it all together was really a precarious stack of outdated expectations. She couldn’t bear to let go - she knew she would surely fall blackly across vision to drown in the white reverse.
It is the task of our body and our psyche to experience wholeness and we will do anything for that end. When we have been separated from ourselves, through repression, trauma, social conditioning, we’ll naturally compensate. If your left ankle is injured, your right ankle will compensate. When we’ve dropped a piece of our Self, we’ll pretend and perform, hoping no one notices we’re hobbling along life. Soon, the pressure put on your right ankle from taking on the load of the left can cause a new injury in itself. Compensation is problematic when unconscious, when being resourceful becomes depleting.
She isn’t alone in the insatiable quest of busyness. Her obsession with creating an acceptable outer world is an unconscious compensation for the part of herself she dropped so long ago. Her body, her psyche, is searching for herself - scanning every face, every flash of the screen for a semblance of herself that she lost. She looks for herself in the latest cycles that speed by, in the 7-step routines parasocial strangers seem to flawlessly execute, but instead of becoming more herself, she feels more estranged. Looking outside of herself for herself is a treadmill trap - she’ll exhaust herself and cover no ground. The self she has been searching for is within, but to discover that, she’ll have to slow down long enough to listen.
She didn’t have a solid self to return to - just glimmers of past remembrances of who she was before she was told who to be. So she followed that feeling - an indescribable feeling that guided her like a star. One decision, one step at a time, she noticed. She noticed what she liked, what felt natural to her, what she wanted more of. She allowed herself to want. One by one, the bricks in the towers of hoarded artifacts of who she thought she was supposed to be were dismantled, dissolved, and left her with space. She always wanted to be able to take up space in her own life but never had the space to expand. It felt strange to be able to stretch herself without stretching herself thin.
A life of balance is less about how much time you spend doing what and more about who you are while you’re doing what.
She found herself when she had the space to return to the time she dropped herself. When she stopped seeking answers and started sitting with the questions, she found the piece of herself was buried deep within her all along. It had become lost among the hoard of expectations, pressure and obligation. She was not lost but she had become found.
