Loved for the Performance, Lonely for the Self
They love the way I listen—head tilted at just the right angle, eyes focused with the kind of attention that makes people feel seen. They love how I remember the small details of their lives, how I ask follow-up questions, how I seem genuinely invested in their stories. What they don’t know is that I learned to listen this way because I was terrified of talking, terrified that my real thoughts might leak out and contaminate their perception of who I was supposed to be.
They love my thoughtful text messages, the way I check in at exactly the right moments, the careful curation of encouragement and support that I send like scheduled medications for their various emotional ailments. They don’t know that I draft and redraft each message, calculating the precise tone that will maintain the version of myself they’ve grown to expect.
They love my reliability, the way I show up exactly when promised, exactly as needed, like a human Swiss watch. They don’t know that my punctuality is powered by terror—terror that being late might reveal the chaos that lives beneath my controlled surface, terror that any deviation from perfect behavior might shatter their image of who I am.
This is the loneliest kind of love: being cherished for a performance so convincing that even you sometimes forget you’re acting.
I sit in rooms full of people who care about me, surrounded by affection and approval, and feel like I’m watching from behind soundproof glass. They’re responding to something real—the kindness is real, the care is real—but it’s incomplete, like loving a photograph instead of a person. They’re in relationship with my best intentions while the rest of me—the petty thoughts, the selfish impulses, the moments of genuine cruelty that flash through my mind—remains invisible, unwitnessed, unknown.
The tragedy is that their love is genuine. It’s not fake or manipulative or shallow. They truly care about the person they see, the person I’ve shown them. But that person is a careful selection from the full catalog of who I am, like a museum displaying its finest pieces while keeping the rest in storage.
So when they say “I love you,” part of me wants to ask: “Which part? The part that agrees with you? The part that supports you? The part that never challenges you or disappoints you or makes you uncomfortable? Because that’s not all of me. That’s not even most of me.”
But I don’t ask these questions because I already know the answer would terrify us both.
The most exhausting part is the constant editing. Every spontaneous reaction must be reviewed, every genuine response must be filtered through the question: “Is this consistent with who they think I am?” I’ve become a real-time editor of my own existence, cutting out everything that doesn’t fit the character I’ve created for their consumption.
Sometimes I catch glimpses of what it might feel like to be loved completely—usually in moments of accidental authenticity, when I’m too tired or surprised to perform. A flash of genuine annoyance, a moment of actual vulnerability, a second where my real opinion slips out unguarded. In these moments, I watch their faces carefully, looking for signs that they’ve seen behind the curtain.
Usually, they don’t even notice. The performance has been so consistent that these brief departures from character are absorbed into their established understanding of who I am. But occasionally, I see a flicker of confusion, a momentary pause that suggests they’ve glimpsed someone they don’t quite recognize.
Those moments are both hopeful and heartbreaking. Hopeful because they suggest that maybe, maybe, I could slowly reveal more of myself without losing everything. Heartbreaking because they remind me how much of myself I’ve kept hidden, how much of my inner life has gone unshared, unwitnessed, unloved.
The deepest fear is this: what if the real me is genuinely less lovable than the performed me? What if my instinct to curate and edit and perform has been accurate, what if the full truth of who I am would indeed drive people away? What if the love I receive for my partial self is the only love I’m capable of inspiring?
But there’s another fear, equally powerful: what if I spend my entire life being loved for who I pretend to be and die without ever discovering whether the real me was worthy of love? What if I never find out because I was too afraid to try?
I think about the people I love most deeply, and realize that what I cherish about them isn’t their perfection but their contradictions, their moments of weakness, their human complexity. The friend I love most is not the most consistently kind person I know—she’s the one who lets me see her full range of emotions, including the ones she’s not proud of. The relative I feel closest to isn’t the most successful or impressive—he’s the one who trusts me enough to share his struggles.
Yet somehow I continue to believe that I am the exception, that I must earn love through perfection, that people will only stay if I never let them see the parts of me that are difficult or disappointing or real.
Tomorrow I want to try a small experiment: I want to let one genuine reaction slip through unedited. Just one. I want to see what happens when I respond from my center rather than from my edge, when I speak from the place where my feelings actually live rather than from the place where I think they should live.
Because the loneliness of being loved for who you pretend to be is bearable only if you believe it’s protecting something precious underneath. But what if what’s underneath is not so fragile? What if it’s actually what we’ve all been looking for—not perfection, but presence; not performance, but truth?
The echo chamber of affection is comfortable, but it’s still just echoes. Maybe it’s time to find out what my real voice sounds like when it’s finally safe to speak.