I was thirty-six when I noticed it. I was sitting in a parking lot, in a Trader Joe's, in a car that smelled faintly of my younger child's lunch, and I was crying for no reason I could articulate. The reason I was crying, eventually, when I let myself look at it, was that I had just spent forty minutes inside the store buying groceries for a dinner I did not want to host, for people I did not particularly like, in service of a tradition that had been my mother-in-law's idea, and I had said yes to it, the way I had said yes to almost everything for the previous decade, without asking myself first.
I had been, in that decade, the good daughter, the good employee, the good friend, the good wife, the good daughter-in-law, the good mother. I had been so good, in so many directions, that I had not noticed the central fact, which was that I had not asked myself what I wanted in maybe ten years. Maybe more. Maybe ever.
This is going to sound like a particular kind of essay. The let-me-find-myself essay. I want to be clear that what I am describing is not that. I did not go to Italy. I did not get a divorce. I did not blow up my life. The cultural script for what happens when a woman wakes up in her mid-thirties is dramatic in a way that is, frankly, available mostly to women without children and without aging parents and without a real job. The drama is a luxury. What I had to do was something more interior, and slower.
What I had to do was stop performing. Not stop functioning. Functioning had to continue. The kids needed lunches. The work needed doing. My mother still needed her weekly call. The performance, though — the additional layer of being seen to be doing it well, of orienting myself by the praise — that I could put down. That, I came to understand, was costing me everything.
The first thing I noticed, when I started paying attention, was how much of my day was performed. I performed enthusiasm at work meetings. I performed a particular warm laugh on the phone with my mother-in-law. I performed competence at the school drop-off, in front of other mothers I now suspect were also performing competence. I performed, even, the version of myself I sent into therapy. The therapist eventually noticed and called me on it. She said: you are very good at this. I want to know who you are when you are not so good at it.
I did not have an answer.
That was the moment I understood the depth of the problem. I had built so many performances, for so many audiences, that I had lost track of the original. I was not even sure there was an original anymore. I was a Russian doll of impressions, all the way down, and at the very center, where the smallest doll was supposed to be, there was a kind of quiet bewilderment. Not despair. Bewilderment.
The work of that year — and it was a year, although it has continued past that year, because this kind of work does not end — was small and unglamorous. It was, mostly, about asking myself one question, multiple times a day, and tolerating the long pause that followed. The question was: what do you actually want right now. Not what should you want. Not what would be convenient. Not what would be approved of. What do you, the unobserved you, want.
The first hundred times I asked it, I had no idea. The question would land in a kind of empty room. I had so thoroughly trained myself to want what I was supposed to want that the muscle for noticing my own preferences had atrophied. I would ask what I wanted for dinner and find that I had no opinion. I would ask what I wanted to do on a Saturday and find that the question itself felt indulgent.
The wanting came back slowly. In small, almost humiliating ways. I wanted, it turned out, to take a bath in the middle of the afternoon. To read a novel nobody would consider serious. To not host the dinner. To stop being on the parents' WhatsApp group. None of these were profound. But each one was a vote, cast quietly, for the existence of an actual person underneath all the performances.
I want to be honest about the cost. People noticed. My mother-in-law noticed. A friend who had relied on me to be the dependable yes-saying friend noticed. The price of stopping the performance is that some people preferred the performance, and they liked you better when you were running it, and when you stop they will, in subtle and not subtle ways, ask you to start again.
What I have come to believe is that the performance was not a costume I had been wearing. It was a load-bearing wall. Taking it down was not a matter of removing a layer to reveal the real me underneath. The real me was not waiting, fully formed, behind the wall. The real me was a person I had to slowly, awkwardly, build, in the rubble, while continuing to make lunches.
I am not done. I am thirty-eight now. I am still, on a regular basis, catching myself mid-performance. The difference is that I now notice. The noticing is the whole thing. The noticing is what I was not doing for the decade before, and the noticing is what makes the next decade different. I do not always stop the performance. Sometimes I am tired and I let it run. But I know, now, when I am running it, and that knowledge is the small flame I am trying to keep lit. It is not a personality. It is just an ember. It is enough.