when we stop performing: 5 enriching outcomes

new people, new freedoms, better art, more meaningful friendships, and genuine relaxation at last

authenticity is absolutely crucial for living a fulfilling life.

when we are not authentic to ourselves, we construct ourselves into something that the world wants us to be. we cannot write because we are trying to be a “serious writer.” we cannot paint because we are trying to be “a creative genius.” we cannot make new friends because we are trying to give a certain impression.

when we are not authentic, our relationships themselves can only with great effort exist beneath the surface level. when we are performing to win the love of some other person, we can never be sure if that person really loves us for our mere existence. since we never really bare ourselves to this person, what this person loves is not actually us: what this person loves is a performance we are putting on. the longer we put on this performance, the harder we will find it to stop, and the more likely we are to trigger strong negative reactions from the people we thought of as best friends who look at us in our true manifestations and say: “you are being fucking fake.”

in a friendship between two men, this dynamic often emerges from the fact that men spend enormous amounts of time trying to be men. i wrote about this in my post on identity drones, which includes a case study on the fundamental nothingness of men. this post has some of my fewest views and so i will quote the relevant examples here.

“the identity drone man, fearing the ultimate insult (“girl!” oh no!), anxiously performs so that other men see that he is a man and not a girl. because the interesting thing about identity drone men is that they do briefly see the girly reality of select other men, but they insult that reality away to avoid looking at it. if a man can force others to be men, and if a man can feel that he is accepted by other emotionally repressed men, then maybe he can finally look inside himself and briefly glimpse a man.

but if “man” were a real thing, a stable thing, a fixed thing, then why would any man ever need to agonize over being seen as a man? would they not naturally act as men?

in their agony they sense that they are not really men. in their confusion they sense that if they simply did whatever they wanted and openly expressed their feelings, other men would eject them from cis heteronormative society.”

the case study of the identity drone man, who is not really even a man but rather simply a being striving to be a man, shows why it is so difficult to stop performing.

when we perform, we effectively build around us a whole world whose very existence hinges on the performance continuing. this goes beyond the obvious: friendships, families, careers, marriages, parental affection. our performance traps us inside an ever-tightening web which we confuse for our very selves: a fabricated image on social media, writing which we know not to really be us but which we are nevertheless extremely defensive about, even the very neighborhood in which we live may simply be the place we believe we are supposed to end up so as to be “successful.”

when we perform, the meaning of our lives becomes dependent upon trying our best to keep our hands around things that we don’t even want and people who would reject us immediately if they saw for one moment who we truly are.

the sad reality: we ourselves might even reject these people if we were to see how they react to our true selves.

we can never know for sure whether these people are truly our friends.

we have no footing for confidence. we do not know if we are actually loved or if these people only congregate around us for our good acting.

the most terrifying thing about performance: performance is not merely external. performance affects also our own internal psyche. just look at the identity drone man:

the man fears “weakness” and “feelings.” for the man, anger is the one emotion which carries with its expression hardly any restrictions. the man is told: be a man, don’t cry. be a man: don’t walk like that; don’t talk like that; don’t move like that; don’t sing or dance like that. to be a man is to deliberately avoid authentic self-expression and even authentic self-reflection: in the name of being a man, the man avoids himself. in the name of being a man, the man becomes nothing.

the identity drone man’s performance runs so deeply into his being that even his own internal thoughts are themselves performances. he will not even allow himself to feel a feeling privately. he will not even allow himself to write a diary privately. in the name of being a man, the man restricts even his own private life. many men go to their graves having never once in their entire lives known who they really are. there are men who have friendships spanning decades, and they do not know each other. all they know: the meaningless physical material which they keep in their mutual orbits.

it is very difficult for the supposed cishet man to ever find himself. i suppose this is why so many angsty young men are drawn to existentialism. the identity drone man lives in a constant state of anxiety which he cannot put into words because he only allows his anxiety to manifest as anger. he tries to look for himself, the construct of manhood as his guide. but he blinds himself rather than gaze upon his own inner radiance, and when he looks inside of himself, he sees nothing.

we will not go the way of the identity drone man on his journey into nothingness.

we will find, embrace, and authentically express our own inner radiance.

here are five amazing outcomes we experience when we stop performing and embrace our true authentic selves.

1. we find new people who love us

when i was struggling after coming out, i joined a facebook group for queer people in my community. i said i was new to the area (i moved here from brooklyn recently) and a few girls messaged me saying welcome! we should get together!

finally i met up with one of these girls at the local gay night club. it was simply amazing how easy it was to talk to her. she kept listing off people she couldn’t wait for me to meet — “this person will love you and this person will love you and this person will love you” — and that was in the face of me telling her exactly the same things i had told my friend who rejected me.

when i would speak on the phone with the friend who ended our friendship over my refusal to compromise my gender expression (see “i was a supernova and he was a blackhole”), i could just hear the unease in his voice. he told me he just didn’t get it: non-binary? what? “i’ll ask you so many questions,” he said, and then instead of asking me questions he ignored my texts describing my feelings and berated me.

already i am making new friends i know will never do that to me.

after he left my life, here’s what i wrote about him in that same post:

“seventeen years,” he says, reprimanding me for “making him the villain” in my “re-discovery story.” think of the stacks of pictures! yet more materials we have added to our orbit, the smiles on those faces nothing more than moldings on mannequins. he cannot appeal to how he makes me feel: he rejects my feelings. he is uncomfortable with how i express my feelings. so there’s only one thing he has: pictures that aren’t even physical, pictures lost in the depths of social media feeds, pictures we will never look at again. all he has is a quantity attached to those smiling faces: seventeen years.

if you embrace your true authentic self, i guarantee you that you will find people who truly love you, and those who are angry will become old memories.

photos my own

2. we experience the rush of freedom

it is not until we embrace our true authentic selves that we know what it really feels like to be free.

when we just come out with our true selves, there is a storm at first: there are people who are angry and struggle to adjust. some will drop out of our lives; others will adapt, apologize for initial reactions, and perhaps something can be rebuilt. either way, the old world will collapse not just in terms of its people but in terms of its rules.

think of all the rules which we unconsciously or consciously enforce upon ourselves whether we agree with these rules or not! how to dress, how to walk, how to talk, how to write, how to smile. the subjects we are allowed to talk about, the traumas we are forced to keep secret, the hobbies for which we feel are made to feel shame. our entire life becomes a contortion. our whole existence becomes a fabrication. our beings are annihilated by the force of external demands, and we are crippled with anxiety.

this used to be me. when i met new people, and even when i saw old friends, i would often feel terrified. of what? of them discovering me. what they would discover, i did not know, but i always knew: i am not loved for me, i am loved for something else, and if these people could just see that badness inside of me, they’d hate me.

but it was not badness inside of me. i only saw myself as bad because i accepted the standards of these people who would never really love me: i convinced myself there weren’t others out there who would love me, as if i were lucky to have friends i knew would hate me the moment i simply revealed myself.

we do not need to live this way. there are many causes for crippling anxiety, but where crippling social anxiety comes from performance, as it did for me, there is an antidote.

it takes so much work to get there, but once we embrace our authenticity, all the rules, expectations, and standards which these people who are not really our friends and do not really love us: all of these regulations distintegrate back into the nothingness of their essential nature, and the people policing them see there is no point.

we think the rules these people tell us to follow are real.

but every last one of them was made up by someone who had no clue what they were talking about. and we see that once we taste the rush of freedom.

3. we become better artists

lately i have been looking back at a lot of my old writing. although i have some subscribers who were reading my old blog as far back as 2014, and even a few who used to read my fucking livejournal in 2005!, snowflakeangelbutterfly is actually the first time in my life i have written for an audience of strangers. after years of work, i am finally finding my voice. i always knew i could be a great writer but i also knew something was holding me back: what was it?

somehow, deep down, i knew i was afraid.

vulnerability is not what scared me. what really frightened me was authenticity. as i wrote in my post “i’m not a cool writer, 'i’m a serious writer”:

we think we need to be vulnerable. and naturally we also associated the vulnerable with the embarrassing, the things which will expose us to the world, and we wonder: do i have anything sad enough about myself to be vulnerable about? but real vulnerability is more expansive than this, and we can also be vulnerable without being authentic. we can be selectively vulnerable, performatively vulnerable, deceptively vulnerable, picking and choosing strikingly vulnerable details from reality and then mixing them up into an inauthentic, forced, and ultimately fabricated work. the reader senses that!

i have always been willing to be vulnerable.

the first time i publicly wrote an early version of the true story “my choice at 16: stop masturbating or burn in hell”, and even when i first shared stories in 2014 from “my middle school memoir,” i actually included many of the same kinds of details: the disgusting fungus in my hair, the oral sex with the boy in his basement, the anti-addiction program meant to help me stop touching myself.

but i erased my mom from the story. i erased this from the story:

(tw: religious trauma - only in this quote)

“god will open up the book of life,” my mom said to me when i was in sixth grade. “and anyone whose name is not in the book of life, he will throw into the lake of fire. they will burn there forever and ever, and they will never stop feeling pain.”

the fire would never fully consume them. there would always be something left of them to burn.

“why won’t they die?” i asked.

“god won’t let them die,” she said. “they have new bodies that keep them alive.”

i asked my mom how i could know that my name was in the book of life.

“only god can know what’s in your heart,” she said.

i asked her if she and my dad would be sad when i was burning in hell.

she told me of course she would be devastated if i was burning in the lake of fire and she never saw me again. “but god tells us,” she said, “that he will wipe every tear from our eyes.”

i had even erased this from my memories. i was so desperate to believe in a happy childhood — which is not my authentic childhood — and so desperate to feel nothing but warmth for my parents that i buried these memories even in my own psyche, like an identity drone man refusing to look at his real feelings.

of course i also did not want my mom to feel sad about these memories. i love her and in all honesty i want her to be happy. we have had a great relationship as adults! but the sadness i don’t want to be there was always still there: only, i had to bear my sadness in secret.

and when i went to tell in writing one of the craziest stories of my life, i could not tell the story in an authentic way because to do so would upset an equilibrium that depended upon me keeping my own experiences tucked away in the dark.

so when i wrote about this experience before this year, i would make fun of myself. i turned myself into a clown for the world to laugh at, and my family laughed too.

i was a freak show. i turned myself into a freak show for the benefit of others.

my own inner life was a performance designed to keep others feeling comfortable about the past while my own ptsd symptoms went unresolved.

when we stop performing, we free our inner lives.

and when we free our lives, we become better artists.

we gain the ability to be not only vulnerable — but also authentic, the true key.

photos my own

4. we become better friends to others

when we are constantly performing, we are consumed by anxiety: we are anxious to stick to a script we’re hardly sure we know, and to deviate from that script seems terrifying. we are always wondering: am i doing this right? am i following the script right? we think: if i mess up the script, they will all hate me.

some of these people may truly love us. we may not actually need to perform around them: we are simply so habituated to winning affection through performance that our performance has become automated and the idea of being ourselves frightens us to the point that when we are with others, we are not really with them.

we are consumed by our own anxious thoughts.

we miss what they are saying. they sense we are ignoring them, and to some degree we are, because we are paying attention to something else: our anxiety.

they are trying to bare themselves to us and we are wondering: “do they really like me?” we think we are bad friends, and it’s because in some ways we are: we are so consumed by our own depression and self-doubt that we are not there with them.

we can only go so deep in such friendships. we can only care so much for others when we are barely able to care for ourselves.

and we cannot truly care for ourselves unless we love ourselves, our real selves.

when we finally express our authentic selves, we find ourselves more at ease in the presence of the people we now know to love us for us. we are more relaxed, we are happier, we are eager to socialize with these friends who really love us.

beyond that sense of ease, though, comes the joy of being really known.

i don't even try
i don't have to think
with you, there's no pretending

you know me, you know me
and I just might know you too, know you
come to me ready

go dancing
(you make me wanna) try on feminine
(you make me wanna) go buy a new dress
(you make me wanna) slip off a new dress

(clairo, “juna”)

phoebe bridgers and the music that blossomed my queerness (retrospective diary: 2021-2024)

5. we can truly relax

when i came out, a new experience mesmerized me entirely: suddenly i could just sit and relax. suddenly i could simply be.

for so long, i had spent so much time worrying whether other people liked me, and i spent all that time hating myself.

now i understand, finally, that i did not hate myself. i hated a phantom self, a fake self that i was trying to be: i hated the script i was following, and i hated the being i saw in my mind when i imagined myself imperfectly executing that script: i did not hate this being because he fell short of the script but because i hated the script itself.

i simply did not know it was a script.

there’s so much relaxation to be found in ripping up the script.