The Performance Problem: Why Your Happiness Should Feel Like Yours, Not Like Someone Else's Script

When masking for the holidays costs more than the joy it's supposed to create

You know the feeling. You're at a holiday gathering and you're performing. Not consciously, necessarily, but it's happening: your face is arranged in a particular way, your energy is at a certain frequency, your responses are calibrated for the room. You're being the version of yourself that fits here. The version that doesn't make people uncomfortable. The version that keeps the gathering running smoothly.

This might be especially true if you're neurodivergent. You've spent your whole life performing neurotypicality—managing your stimming, moderating your intensity, watching your tone, making sure you make eye contact the "right" amount, laughing at jokes that land slightly off for you, making small talk that feels like swimming upstream.

Or maybe you were trained early to manage other people's emotions. To keep the peace. To smile even when you were scared. To prioritize the emotional comfort of the room over what you actually felt. Or you learned that being "too much"—too sad, too angry, too honest, too different—created problems, so you learned to sand down your edges.

Whatever the source, by the time you get to the holidays, you're used to performing. It's automatic. It's kept you safe. But there's a cost.

What Masking Costs

Masking isn't lying. You're not necessarily being inauthentic in the sense of being dishonest. But you are suppressing huge portions of your internal experience in service of managing how others perceive you. You're running two simultaneous processes: one that's present to the social interaction, and one that's monitoring yourself constantly. Am I sitting right? Is my facial expression accurate? Am I too quiet? Too loud? Does my intensity make people uncomfortable?

This dual-process awareness is exhausting. Your cognitive load is immense. Your nervous system is working overtime not because the gathering itself is threatening, but because you're simultaneously managing two parallel realities: what's happening and how you're presenting what's happening.

By the end of the gathering, you're depleted in ways that aren't visible. You might not feel sad or dysregulated. You might just feel empty. Like something important got lost in the performance.

And here's the part that cuts deepest: the people you love don't actually know you. They know the performance. And you carry that isolation silently. You're surrounded by people and utterly alone.

The Narrative Says This Is Necessary

Our culture teaches us that this is the price of connection. You manage yourself so that other people feel comfortable, and in exchange, you get to be part of the gathering. You get to belong. The narrative says: real belonging requires managing yourself. Real love means showing up as whoever makes the other person feel good.

This is the narrative that creates the conditions for people to spend decades not knowing themselves. This is the narrative that makes vulnerability feel dangerous. This is the narrative that says your authentic self—the parts of you that don't fit neatly, that take up space, that need things, that exist outside the narrow box of acceptable—those parts are the problem.

It's a lie. But it's a lie we believe because it has kept us safe. Because being ourselves has sometimes been costly. And the holidays activate all of that at once.

What Changes When You Stop Performing

What would it feel like to show up as yourself? Not perfectly—there's no such thing. Not without any consideration for the people around you—being yourself doesn't mean being thoughtless. But yourself: the version with edges and intensity and weird humor and actual thoughts and maybe stimming hands or needing to move or being quiet or being a lot. Your version.

This is terrifying because it means risking that people won't like this version. And that risk is real. Some people won't. Some relationships are built on you managing yourself for their comfort, and if you stop, the relationship will shift. It might end.

But here's what also becomes possible: connection that isn't conditional on performance. Relationships where people know you. Where you're not simultaneously present and monitoring yourself. Where your happiness is actually yours—not something you're faking, not something you've been trained to do.

The people who love you for who you actually are? Those relationships are worth protecting. And if you only ever show them the performance, you rob them of the chance to actually love you.

A Practice in Reclaiming Authenticity

This isn't something you can flip like a switch. If masking has been your survival strategy, you can't just decide to stop and expect it to work. But you can practice. Small steps. Here's what that might look like:

Identify one small, authentic expression

What's one thing you usually hide or manage that you could let show? Maybe you laugh different than you usually let yourself. Maybe you have an opinion about something that's usually polite agreement. Maybe you need to move or stim in a way you usually suppress. Pick something small. Something that feels manageable. And let it be visible.

Notice: Who responds? How? What happens? You're gathering data. You're testing whether the risk is as severe as your nervous system believes it is.

Notice the cost of performing

At the end of the gathering, what does the exhaustion feel like? Where do you feel it in your body? Is it different on gatherings where you manage yourself more versus gatherings where you manage yourself less? Is there a relationship between how much you performed and how empty you felt afterwards? This is important information. Your body is telling you something true.

Find your people

You might not be able to be fully yourself with your entire family. But is there one person? One corner where you don't have to perform? One conversation where you can be more real? Start there. Let that be your anchor. Let that person see you. Let that relationship be a template for what's possible.

Experiment with small breaks from the performance

"I need to step outside for a minute" might just be an excuse to take off the mask for five minutes. "I'm quieter today, it's just where I'm at" instead of performing brightness. "I'm not really in the mood for small talk" instead of forcing it. These are tiny cracks in the performance. They're also opportunities for people to see you. And they're necessary for your nervous system to not completely exhaust itself.

The Difference It Makes

When you start reclaiming your authenticity—even in small ways—something shifts. You're less exhausted because you're not running that parallel monitoring process. You're more present because more of you is actually there. And paradoxically, people feel it. They feel that you're more genuinely here, even if you're being "less appropriate." And the people who matter respond to that realness.

Your happiness will feel different when it's actually yours. Not manufactured. Not performed. Real. And while that might be less "appropriate" for what the holidays are supposed to look like, it's infinitely more valuable. Because it's true.

An Offer

This holiday season, what if you didn't have to perform? What if your value wasn't dependent on managing yourself for other people's comfort? What if the people who matter actually want to know you—all of you, including the parts that are weird or intense or different?

You can test this slowly. You can protect yourself while you test it. But you can start. And in starting, you reclaim something essential: the right to be known. The right to have your happiness be actually yours.

--- What's one small, authentic part of yourself you're usually hiding? What would it feel like to let that show, just once?