Performative Humaning
For much of my life I have felt like part, if not all, of me has been in hiding or in a state of constant comparison. Whether that is hiding from myself, my coworkers, or the greater global community, I have found myself often sitting at the bottom of a deep hole looking up at the daylight squinting and wondering…what the hell is going on? It is all a giant mess of living, buried beneath tangled growth formed from half believed stories about who we are, how we should be and a desperate need to meet the expectations of those around us. Does this story sound familiar? This experience is one that most of us have embodied at some point along our way.
How do you exist in a space when you don’t feel you belong? Either to the space itself, those that are occupying it, or even your own body? It has felt like an eon of deeply complex and exhausting existence for many of us. More and more, I continue to subscribe to a seemingly never-ending ocean of excellent substack newsletters (love/hate relationship endureth on), to read brilliant writers’ musings in their essays, and daily I find my way into poems that I didn’t know that I needed but I did. Many of those from poets whose starstuffs have long ago rejoined the cosmos. From all of this creative outpouring, I see common themes emerging, weaving, smacking me in the face.
We are desperate to be released and we are all, for the most part, drowning in this collective show/game/race we have chosen to partake in, or been conscripted in to, since being children. Those who are not visibly floundering are either
1.) spiritually enlightened
or (more likely)
2.) performing and wearing a mask that obscures what’s really happening
Everywhere, people cry out to be seen, heard, and understood as meaningful. SO many of us feel so far from who we want to be. For chrissake I have been writing silly little blogs on the internet since I was 23 on this very subject, circling the drain as it were but never fully flushing it out. That is eleven years ago now. A DECADE of the same questions and the same wondering if I am doing ‘it’ wrong and when will I feel like I matter. ‘It’ being life and all of….this stuff, this being person.
What does it even mean to matter when so much in the world feels like a thin fabric being torn into pieces by agendas and missions that stretch us and wring us out until there is nothing left?
“The hard for a moment does not mean hard forever.”
It has been a hard year among many hard years but this one seems especially hard not just for myself but for a number of my dearly beloved earthly companions who are facing the worst of the worst. What doesn’t help in scenarios like this is that when you are really mucking down into it the damp, dark well inside yourself, instead of finding that lovely fungal network of super information down where grit is supposed to live, all you find is an unconscionable sadness and a total adversity to keep going.
Yet, we do. Keep going that is.
Hope.
In all that we often find ourselves, outside of ourselves and on the outskirts of all those who live in and around us, hope is the little unifying force that persists in us all.
There is so much out there in the world at large that tell us that most humans truly-deeply-madly struggle with feeling shame, discontent, and a perplexing sense of something being wrong. For many mind-rooted persons that manifests as often feeling like one is not…real? We now understand and recognise within ourselves that this reflects an element of body-mind disassociation as well as a recognition that we are playing parts within a system that is attempting to encourage us into predictable behaviours in order to keep the machine moving. Luckily with our growing body of knowledge and discourse we now have words to define and recognise a little more the breadth of these experiences. People are waking up to this social order that leads to disorder and a reckoning has been coming but it is hard and it hurts and requires a tenacity that sits more in the grey areas of life than in the definite camps of black and white thinking.
Older generations often were in a withholding pattern with concepts such as ‘mental health’ and ‘emotional wellbeing’. As such, many many people internalised a belief that the wrongness they felt was indigenous to their general self as opposed to something that happens to them and thus, had little recourse for moving through it. We are operating with seven generations of beliefs laid down within our bodies and souls. That is how long it takes to break cycles and reform systems of belief. Performing at being human takes people from the margins of nuance and personal calibration over a lifetime, and thrusts them into wearing fixed masks of behaviour and interaction as almost a survival based tool cultivated day to day. These masks give a false sense of control in how we live when really they are the ones controlling us. This conditioning owes a large part (not all but some) to the ideology of a gender standard. For women it has historically been reflected in being subjected to the exhausting war on our sense of value and worth and being told we are a body first and a mind second. For men it’s the opposite. They have been brutalized by the ideology that they are all utility and everything else is weakness and it has created massive problems of deep pain, longing, unmet need and emotional bastardisation within masculinity. We have a problem and we have only started to come to terms with how we are all faking what we think makes us matter.
“We have to want it and let ourselves feel—really feel—the vulnerability of that wanting. And it is profoundly vulnerable. Wanting is always vulnerable. Which is why we—especially women (but also many men)—learn to avoid it, on the false hope that doing so will protect us from pain of not getting.
But it won’t.”
We are told on every front, assaulted by the world, that we cannot want to be more than what it determines are the measures of a ‘well lived life’. Beyond all that, this feeling of not-realness that we see so many carry with them is significantly worsened by the daily reckoning of “yes and what else?”. Our rightness within ourselves is not enough, we make more sense in a system of compliance and control if we can always be led back to a state of yearning, wanting and consuming or, conversely, denying. If this then that…a logic based on a condition that doesn’t really capture the breadth of ‘a specific outcome will occur when a certain condition is met'
If I punish myself for eating junk food and candy, I will learn to associate them with negative outcome
If I deny myself sweets over time, I will demonstrate self control.
If I have self control, I will lose weight.
If I lose weight, I will be beautiful.
If I am beautiful, I will be desired.
If I am desired, I will be loved.
If I am loved, I will have power.
And yet, we are not if-then creatures we are both-and beings.
{Thank you to my brilliant sister for that concept}
When we get to the end of that place of ‘if this then that’ we realise, there is no fulfillment. This thing, the system or machine or government or church, never stops telling us we must meet a condition in order to be accepted and acceptable. We are not machines, and striving to embody a life that is determined by standards that are imposed externally in order to validate our internal does not get rid of that gnawing hunger creature that leaves us feeling…empty.
There is a great sense of un-belonging among so many. Think of this, how many whole-hearted, wholly satisfied people do you know? We have a proliferation, especially here in the self-help capital of the world-America-of people telling us all the tips, tricks, mindset adjustments, identities, politics and anything else that can find us…find ourselves. We do not work if we are not kept in a state of yearning because yearning can be fed and feeding is profitable. However, these things they do not last not without a fleshed out sense of embodiment.
t e m p o r a r i l y b e l o n g i n g
Often I find in the deep revelation of the heaviest parts of my being I don’t really feel that I believe most of it. I have done much of it, aligned with the correct acceptable values, performed the good behaviour, fed the beast that hands out titles and reward. Eventually I pushed myself into the hands of a demon of shrinking that told me I would only be loved if I was smaller and do you know where that led me? I nearly became one with oblivion. When I was brought to my knees in front of my one life and asked ‘will I live as who I am?’ I couldn’t even answer because I could not discern myself from the one I had been performing.
There are so many of us who turn to the nest of woolstuffs of our selves and try to detangle and pull a thread loose only to find it comes up short. There is a communal feeling of breathlessness with overwhelm at how to share who we are and what we are meant to do with our lives. The algorithm of our means based world tells us to do it quickly because time is running out and who do we think we are if we subvert the norm? Punishment in the form of social defenestration awaits those who dare to thwart the correct way to live. Eventually all people come to a place where, in our quiet moments, we begin to question “am I really that thing or have I simply been performing as that thing?” Time and time again it comes up in so many realms. Everyone wants to know what is the meaning of our life, but that meaning can only fall within the correct parameters of the social contract of being a human renting a space on this small patch of earth or else…well you are out.
Toni Morrison has a quote that reads, “Your real life is with us, your family. You are not the work you do; you are the person you are…”. It struck me, as I have been idling to and fro in my mind on the matter of self-worth and work, that a large component of the internal battle many of us face is that we don’t know what, or who will certify us. How do we know we are living correct? Especially for those of us who have left the ‘traditional’ modes of validation-a place of paid and socially acknowledged labour- a position obscured from the world of its impact and meaning. How can one know what is real life to them if they feel like they don’t register in the world as significant?
The general attitude felt, if not acknowledged, by all is that we delude ourselves into measuring our life against the perception of progress that have been agreed upon based on a set of social expectations and norms as laid down by the nations to which we belong. But, as it happens for every single one of us, shite hits the fan and it does this with seemingly with more and more rapid and painful occurrence as the years have been passing. How do these idealistic expectations hold up in the face of a great undoing? Are things getting worse? It certainly feels like life is falling apart and nothing is working, our suffering does not end, we can’t seem to reconcile our actual reality with our expectation of reality and the malcontent makes us feel guilty when there are people who are truly suffering across the globe.
Being awake to the fact that we are simply trying is not a small thing to be snuffed at. It is the most glorious and challenging line to hold. A refusal to cave. The masks of performing at being human are so very tempting to hold to and the longer we wear them the harder it is to remove them. Take it from someone who is gifted at being what is most needed by others at any given time. It is really nice to be that thing everyone asks of you because the reward of acceptance nourishes a lonely person for a long time. I have been so hungry and yet, with all I have tried to live up to who I thought I was meant to be I have never felt an enduring sense of mattering. Not when it came from outside of me. I want to be relentless in finding my way to being human on my terms and I want that for everyone else.