who are we all performing for?

each swipe on the screen fuels the fire that burns away the ties between us.

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I never aspired to be a performer, but I’ve been acting for as long as I can remember. My first memories are those that required a calculated song and dance; how I knew the steps or notes, I’m really not sure.

Babies are not the ignorant balls of snot we credit them with being, you know. Nor are toddlers just babbling 2-foot-tall idiots who lack awareness either of self or of you.

I’m not a parent, so I don’t know what it’s like to be solely responsible for the upbringing of such impressionable and maleable balls of clay. But as a potter, I can tell you how it feels to mold and shape and sometimes inadvertently damage or scar a piece because you took your eye off the prize for one faint second.

Children are constantly performing for their parents; it’s how they learn the mores of the world thrust upon them. They know a cry can elicit nourishment, a diaper change, a soothing hug — parental attention at its most basal. They know a smile or giggle warrants the same response in return, but frustrating whines yield frowns and disdain.

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As they grow, these boundaries are constantly tested for the audience of two imperfect humans and then eventually for the broader social circle of grandparents, teachers, and fellow new-to-lifers. As a stage actor or mime, the end goal is always to gauge the audience's reaction so as to scale up or tone down the next move in accordance with their engagement.

But what is a young actor to do if the audience is unengaged, constantly distracted, and dismissive? Or what then if there is an audience of 1 who is perpetually unsatisfied, more an unappeasable director than an audience, really. And day after day, you find yourself trying out for a role you never wanted in the first place.

Thrust into an unpolished play with a new script to memorize every day. Perfection is the ultimate measure of value in this role, but the definition of perfection is vacillating as wildly as the plot.

As we learn to perform on stage, we are also learning to be amongst the audience. What our caregivers mirror to us is what we come to mirror to others as we grow older.

If we were met with upturned noses and the painful but constant judgment of never being enough, so too will nothing and no one be enough for us.

If we are met with curiosity and love, then so too do we have these as tools to offer our peers later in life.

Before the rise of social media, the audience was smaller, and the standard for performing was relative — born primarily out of the community in which you were raised and the standards and rules that governed it. For better and for worse, truly, because if you were queer in a religiously conservative community, you had no concept of your own rightness or the queer community that awaited you out there. No, you were shamed and isolated, and you quite possibly believed them when they told you how wrong and damned you were.

On the flipside of the coin, in a homogeneous society, there is less breadth of comparison and fewer options. You and all the girls in your class were raised with roughly the same socioeconomic status, with the same decree to marry well and breed abundantly. The means by which you could fit in, whether you wanted to in your heart of not, were simply less variable and you didn’t know better.

Now we have a window, albeit a warped one, into the world beyond our native borders. It is not a pretty one. If anything, it is one that made the demands of our life’s performance infinitely more rigorous and capricious. Suddenly, the audience has expanded beyond your neighborhood's geographical borders to encompass the eyes of the world. The critics are crueler, the competition is everyone, and the stakes are higher. One false move and you face every actor's pinnacle of failure, irrelevancy.

You have access to every option for your life, every possible outcome, a contradictory zeitgeist of living right and maintaining relevance.

Today, the worthy actors wear this and say that.

Tomorrow we will care about this and shun that.

If you actually enjoyed last month’s this, the joke is on you for missing the satire of it all.

And around and around it goes. Each swipe on the screen fuels the fire that burns away the ties between us.

Even being among the audience is a part of the performance, and we’ve all been trained to respond on cue.

So my question is: if we are all simultaneously living out and spectating a play we never really cared about, who, then, are we all performing for?

And what is tireless performance distracting us from?

There is a quiet subsection of the ultra-wealthy who pay for the very anonymity and irrelevancy that those of us stuck on the hamster wheel are running so fervently from. Sure, they own that hamster wheel and the energy it generates, but they could do that all the same, like the Elon Musks of the world, with their faces branded on all that they conquer.

So what does this quiet minority know that we do not?

My takeaway? There is power in finding your own incognito mode, and wealth has nothing to do with it.

I recently went to my 10-year high school reunion and ran into a girl I was once good friends with. She was one of the few people from high school, or really that I knew personally at all, whom I still followed on social media before deleting my apps for good. She was living a life I admired from across the glass, artistic and whimsical. The kind of life that puts the Pinterest art girlies to shame. Thrifting outfits we think are cute but know we couldn’t pull off ourselves. Sharing Polaroid-style photography of birthday parties and half-finished paintings. A cute little blond bob and a curated arm of tattoos.

I went up to her at the reunion and told her I followed her, and I thought her life looked really cool.

Her response, “Oh, that is all fake.”

Of course it is. She’s performing, as we all are. She’s just found the way of performing that she is best at. She seemed sad and embarrassed to tell me it was fake. Like she blurted out a secret she’d been holding onto for too long, desperate for relief from the lie.

I told her that even if it felt fake, part of her was still living it, and that made it real enough for me.

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Who are you when no one is watching? You’ve likely seen the question before and felt that internal churning of cognitive dissonance awaken inside of you at the thought of having to answer it.

Speaking for myself, I am larger than life and smaller than it. I am not interested in contorting and squeezing into the narrow space that millions of others are competing for. I am too big and far, far too much for this. And at the same time, I am not special or important, I won’t leave a legacy or a thought behind. I am too small and insignificant to warrant this level of scrutiny.

I live a quiet, small life where I am free to be big within. Big fish, small pond. I’d choose this every time because here I can show up differently and imperfectly every day, and the only audience is those who are awed by my talent to do so.

You cannot win at life. There is no pinnacle of success or measure of accolades that can fill what you didn’t get in your childhood. You are not measurable. You are of this universe, ever expanding gloriously into the unknown. You must fill yourself with the abundance of life teeming around you, become so full with it that you must grow in order to accommodate all that you learn and become.

Do not fear growth because you do not see where it fits into an acceptable society; fear a society that has limitless space but tries to shrink you anyway.

No one is actually looking at you. They are glued to a mirror that only shows them all they think they can never be.

Choose to put the mirror down.

For you, and only you.

-June

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