The Woman I Was Performing Being vs. The Woman I Actually Am

The cover image for my debut single is a mirror selfie.

I am wearing a floral dress. My hair is done. I look, by any observable measure, put together. The word MINE is written in burgundy across the image.

I chose that image specifically because for most of my life, the put-together surface was the thing people saw. I was someone who dressed well. I answered questions confidently. I showed up to things and said the right things and looked like a person who was managing her life competently.

Beneath that: I was longing for something I could not name. I was reaching, in ways I did not always recognize, for the specific comfort of my mother. I was carrying grief about a childhood that looked fine from the outside and felt, on the inside, like a particular kind of quiet absence.

The mirror selfie is not ironic. It is accurate. It is the image of someone who learned, early and well, that presentation was one of the few things fully within her control.

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What a performed identity is and where it comes from

Developmental psychologist Donald Winnicott, whose work on the true and false self remains foundational in relational psychology, described the false self as a defensive structure that develops when the environment is not reliably responsive to the child's authentic experience. The false self is not a lie, exactly. It is an adaptation. It develops in response to the accurate perception that certain expressions of self are not safe or welcome, and it builds a version of self that is.

The performed self is not built from nothing. It is built from observation: of what gets rewarded, what gets ignored, what produces warmth and what produces distance. A child raised in an environment where emotional need was not welcomed learns quickly which version of herself gets a better response. She builds that version carefully and maintains it with real effort.

By the time she is an adult, the performance has been running so long it no longer feels like performance. It feels like personality.

Psychologist Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic at University College London, whose research on personality and identity includes work on self-monitoring, found that high self-monitors, people who carefully regulate their self-presentation based on situational cues, often have difficulty distinguishing between their performed and authentic selves. The performance becomes habitual, then automatic, then invisible. The person no longer knows they are doing it.

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What the performance looked like in practice

It looked like competence as a default mode. Whatever I was asked, I had an answer. Whatever was needed, I found a way to provide it. Emotional need, from myself or others, was managed efficiently and without visible distress.

It looked like dressing well specifically in moments of internal chaos. There is a line in my story about this song: my eyes always told the truth even when I dressed fine. The dressing was a way of maintaining the surface when the interior was nowhere near fine. It was not vanity. It was control.

It looked like knowing exactly what was expected of me in every room and delivering it. Social situations, professional situations, relational situations: I read the room, identified what was wanted, and produced it. This is a useful skill and also an exhausting way to live, because it requires constant environmental monitoring at the expense of internal monitoring.

It looked like having almost no knowledge of what I actually wanted, because wanting was a secondary concern to what was needed in the room.

Psychologist Jennifer Freyd, whose research on betrayal trauma and institutional betrayal at the University of Oregon is among the most cited in trauma studies, describes the adaptive strategy of children in unsafe or emotionally unavailable environments as involving a redirection of attention outward. To survive in an environment that is unpredictable or non-responsive, the child becomes expert at reading the environment. This outward attention comes at a cost: the interior life receives less attention, less language, less space. Over time, the exterior world is much better mapped than the interior one.

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Why it is hard to see from the inside

The performance is invisible from the inside partly because it began before there was a vantage point outside of it.

By the time a child who adapted early is old enough to reflect on her patterns, the patterns are already decades old. She does not remember a time without them. They are not a choice she can remember making. They are simply how she is.

They are also, in many ways, functional. The performed self is often very good at the world. It is competent, presentable, agreeable. It produces real outcomes: relationships, professional success, the consistent experience of being told "you seem so together." These outcomes feel like confirmation that the performance is correct, which makes stopping harder.

What makes stopping possible is usually the cost finally becoming visible.

The cost: exhaustion that does not resolve with rest. A chronic sense of disconnection that does not lift even in situations that should feel meaningful. Relationships that are satisfying on the surface and somehow, underneath, not quite reaching the parts of you that most need to be reached. The specific loneliness of being surrounded by people who know the performed version of you and have limited access to the actual one.

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What began to happen when I stopped

The song is part of how I stopped.

I wrote MINE on one of the worst days of my life and I could not perform while I was writing it. The grief was too present. The longing was too direct. The song said what the performance had been holding back for years: I am still the woman who craves her mom. I am still the girl who longs for her dad. I am one step closer to being mine.

Listen to MINE →

That line, one step closer to being mine, is the most accurate description of what stopping the performance feels like. Not arrival. Not transformation. A step. And then another step. And the recognition, over time, of what is you and what is the adaptation.

Psychologist Kristin Neff at the University of Texas at Austin, whose research on self-compassion is among the most replicated in the field, found that one of the primary barriers to authentic self-expression is what she calls harsh self-judgment. People who learned early that their authentic self was not safe often internalized the judgment that the authentic self is, in some fundamental way, not enough. The performance is a defense against that judgment being confirmed by others.

What self-compassion offers, and what dropping the performance requires, is a willingness to let yourself be seen as you actually are, including the longing, the grief, the not-knowing, the still reaching — and to extend to that self the same basic recognition you would extend to anyone else carrying those things.

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The woman in the mirror selfie is dressed well. That is true.

She is also, in the same moment, carrying something she spent years not naming. She is one step closer to being the woman she actually is rather than the woman she constructed for safety.

Both things are visible in the image if you know where to look.

That is what the cover of MINE is about. The performance and the truth of it, in the same frame, at the same time. Not resolved. Not finished. Just finally visible.