Less Performance, More Presence

Somewhere along the way, many of us learned to perform before we learned to simply be.

For me, that lesson started early.

I grew up in a Chinese family where the unspoken rule was simple: we look put together. No drama. No airing what happens behind closed doors. I was told directly as a child not to bring up family matters outside the home. And I understood, even then, the intention behind it. Privacy is not the same as hiding. Not everyone needs to know your business.

But somewhere in that teaching, I also learned something else. I learned to put on a face. To feel the emotion, shut it down, and carry on as if nothing happened. To perform composure even when something inside was quietly unraveling.

And I don't think my family is unique in this. Not even close.

Where does performance come from?

Performance doesn't begin as deception. It begins as survival.

Think about it. As children we are completely open. We cry when we are sad. We laugh without checking if anyone thinks it's funny. We say exactly what we feel the moment we feel it. We are fully, unselfconsciously ourselves.

And then the world begins to respond.

Maybe a parent told you to stop being so sensitive. Maybe you expressed something real and the room got uncomfortable. Maybe you watched someone you loved get dismissed or ridiculed for feeling too openly, and you quietly made a note: don't do that. Maybe your culture, your family, your school, your community taught you that certain emotions were acceptable and others were not. That being too loud, too sad, too angry, too much, came with a social cost.

So you learned to edit.

Not because you were dishonest. But because you were paying attention. Because you wanted to belong. Because belonging felt safer than being fully seen and possibly rejected.

Performance is what we reach for when we don't feel safe enough to simply be.

And the painful part is that most of us learned this so young, and so gradually, that we don't even remember making the choice. It just became the way we moved through the world. Composed. Managed. Presentable.

The face we learn to wear

In Chinese culture there is a concept most people have heard of even if they don't know the word for it. Keeping face. Mianzi. The maintenance of dignity, reputation, and harmony in how you appear to others. It is not about vanity. It runs much deeper than that. It is about the collective, about not disrupting the harmony of the family or community, about what your behavior reflects on everyone around you.

I grew up inside that. The unspoken agreement that we hold it together. That we don't bring the inside outside. That we feel what we feel and then we carry on.

And honestly? There are things I respect about that. Discretion has value. Not every emotion needs an audience. Privacy can be a form of dignity.

But there is also a cost. When you learn early that your inner life is something to contain rather than express, you start to lose touch with it. You stop trusting your own feelings as valid. You begin to wonder if what you feel is appropriate, reasonable, acceptable, before you even let yourself feel it fully.

You perform. Even for yourself.

When did being emotional become too much?

Here's what nobody really talks about.

I was told as a child not to cry in public. To this day I try not to cry in public. Just like that. A single instruction, delivered early enough, and it became a rule I still carry in my body without even questioning it.

That is how deep this goes.

It doesn't take trauma. It doesn't take cruelty. It just takes a message, repeated often enough or delivered at the right moment, and we absorb it as truth. As the way things are. As who we are supposed to be.

When you do finally let something real come through, when you allow yourself to actually be seen in a feeling, sometimes you feel bad about it afterward. Too much. Too loud. Too emotional. You replay it. You wonder if you made someone uncomfortable. You wish you had stayed quieter, more composed, more contained.

When did being emotional become something to apologize for?

When did feeling deeply become a problem?

It's so heavy to carry that. The emotion itself, and then the shame layered on top of the emotion. And the performance doesn't just happen in public. It begins to happen inside. We start to police ourselves before anyone else gets the chance to. We become our own audience, our own critic, our own editor.

And then we wonder why we feel so far from ourselves.

Think about Kanye West for a moment. Whatever your feelings about him, there is something worth sitting with here. He is a person who expresses the wild, unfiltered, enormous emotions that most of us feel somewhere inside but never go to. The rage. The grandiosity. The grief. The desperate need to be seen, known, and understood. The refusal to shrink.

And the world calls him crazy.

But what if he is not crazy so much as unmanaged? What if what makes people so uncomfortable about him is not that he is so different from us, but that he is so recognizable? He is expressing outward what most of us keep carefully locked away. And when we see it something in us reacts. Because it is familiar. Because part of us recognizes it. Because somewhere inside we have those same feelings and we have spent years learning to keep them contained.

We don't call him crazy because he is alien to us.

We call him crazy because he is a mirror.

The storyteller in me

I want to be honest about something else while I'm here.

My mom was honest, mostly. But she also had a flair. Very Leo, very Pisces, very much someone who knew how to shape a story for the room. Emotional, expressive, a natural storyteller. I watched her and I absorbed it.

And me? As a kid I won several writing awards. I had quite the imagination. I wrote about living in castles. I created entire worlds. I had a gift for taking something real and giving it color and shape and feeling.

I've had to make peace with the fact that this gift has two sides.

My words through the years have sometimes leaned dramatic. A fib here and there. A story that grew a little in the telling. But I've come to understand that differently now. Because what is a great story if not the truth with its heart made visible? Every film, every show, every novel takes real human experience and builds something around it so you can feel it more fully. That is not lying. That is craft. That is the Pisces in me, the emotional depth, the desire to connect, finding its form.

I am a storyteller. That is a gift. I'm claiming it.

The difference, I've learned, is between storytelling and performing. Storytelling has honesty at its core. It shapes truth so others can feel it. Performing is something else. It shapes your surface so others won't see you.

One is an act of connection. The other is an act of protection.

Coming home

Presence isn't a technique. It isn't something you add to your routine or achieve through discipline.

It's a returning.

A willingness to stop editing yourself for a moment and simply be where you are, as you are, with what is actually true right now.

That can feel terrifying at first. Because when we stop performing we don't always know what's underneath. Sometimes it's peace. Sometimes it's grief we've been outrunning for years. Sometimes it's a quietness that surprises us with how good it feels to finally stop.

I think about the little kid who wrote about castles and felt everything so deeply and won awards for it. She wasn't performing. She was completely alive in her imagination, her feeling, her expression.

That is still in here. It never left.

The Shen doesn't go anywhere. Our true essence, the spirit that lives in the heart, it is steady through all of it. It just gets quieter when we are too busy keeping the face on.

And when we do let something real come through, and then feel bad about it afterward, that is just the old reflex. The internalized voice that says you were too much. That says be more manageable. More palatable. Easier for others to hold.

But what if you were never too much?

What if you were just, briefly and beautifully, yourself?

So here is what I am practicing. Less face. Less management. Less performing for rooms that may not even be watching anymore. More of whatever is actually true in this moment.

Your Shen was never asking you to shrink.

Your heart has been speaking this whole time.

Maybe it's finally time to stop performing over it and listen.