The performance begins innocently - this is not about being consciously deceptive.
It's about adapting to roles and expectations and becoming competent, capable, and reliable at what you do. Then the role works for you and you are rewarded emotionally for it. So you continue with it, adapting with it, and making it part of what you do. Gradually the role becomes fused with your identity - who you are rather than what you do.
This is the turning point becasuse now you no longer do the role. You become the responsible one / the capable one / the calm one / the high performer / the stable one. And the adaptation becomes self maintained as you want to continue to be that person.
Internal uncertainty appears when something shifts underneath. But because the role has become identity, questioning anything internally now feels threatening. Not just:
“something feels off”
But:
“who am I if this role no longer fits?”
This is much deeper and feels riskier due to the destabilising impact. Not just for your own sense of self and the life you have created, but what about the potential side effects on everyone else in your world? What would your uncertainty do to their reliance on you as the capable one that has the answers?
So the performance intensifies. People often think uncertainty would cause someone to drop the act where actually the opposite usually happens. The shakier things feel internally, the more polished the external becomes. I wrote more about this quiet internal disconnection in 'Steady on the Outside'.
And the more we run the 'role' the more we have no need for intuition. In fact, the feeling of something not being right feels quietly like intuition so we need to stop listening to it to carry on. Until we cant even hear it anymore, or it is no longer recognised.
Eventually there are feelings of disconnection, a sense of being absent, or a ghost-like presence whilst the performing self keeps functioning… but the person inside no longer feels fully present. You start to just move through the motions, and rely on automatic responses. You do not emotionally participate; as if you are 'acting' life rather than living it.
So sometimes the exhaustion that then results alongside isn’t from the responsibilities themselves. It’s from the distance between the role being performed and the self underneath it.
Before anything can be consciously rebuilt there is usually a quieter phase of making sense of what has shifted underneath the performance.
