There have been times in my life when I wanted someone to love me, as a friend, as a partner, and instead of simply being myself, I showed them a version of me I thought they wanted. I held up a façade. For a while, it worked. But the weight of the façade became too heavy to hold, and the part of me I had hidden grew resentful. When my shadow finally broke through, it didn’t just dissolve the performance. It destroyed the relationship, and left me embarrassed by my own behavior.
The relationships that have endured are the ones where I showed all of myself. Where conflicts arose from protection rather than punishment, from love rather than the accumulated weight of what I should have said and didn’t. Authenticity draws out authenticity. When I stopped performing, the people worth keeping stopped performing too. Through that, we found a collective flow that pulled us closer rather than pushing us apart.
