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Every Day is a Performance of Self For Others

Many among us agonize over the existential limitation that we can never fully experience another's inner world, experience and feelings. 

This means our own subjective human experience also remains entirely unknowable to others.

The closest we come is to perform the self we wish others knew, but acting oneself isn't an adequate conduit; instead, it's a mediated form of selfhood.

Much of life is spent trying to close the gap between the self we understand ourselves to be and the self others perceive.

We tell people what we want them to believe about us, and our behavior matches, creates congruence, or signals incongruence. What we wear, how we wear it, how we respond, and position ourselves in space are signals, signposts we use to mediate how people see us. 

There is a primal divide in us—the person we are versus the story of us we were raised to believe.

Every examined life dedicates itself to unearthing the original self before our narratives get shaped and cemented, to removing the accumulated symbols, signifiers, costumes, attitudes, and codes placed upon us by others. 

Feeling misunderstood is the core sense of many people's lives (hello, it's me). Often, there is a distance between what we say and how we behave, and it's in that gap that a person is understood. 

Ironically, in our effort to be known, we perform the self we wish others knew, thwarting the motive, our deepest desire, to be known.

Like Rilke’s letters on solitude, we are all uniquely alone.

You can never feel the exact texture and shape of my sadness, joy, or anger, as I can never feel yours. Everything is an approximation, yet we work hard to control our audience's perception of us, hoping for exactitude.

There is little more cliché than wearing a mask in public, of the world being a stage on which we all perform. Yet, the overuse of a cliché signifies its historical necessity and resonance with the human experience.

While we can thank or damn Shakespeare, it was the brilliant mid-century sociologist Erving Goffman (the 73rd president of the American Sociological Association) who took that cliché and unpacked it, revealing how elaborately and seamlessly our disguises are woven into the fabric of human interaction.

Here’s what his most famous book tells us…

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