The strength of growing insight will help you look truthfully at your chosen personas and the roles you play in social life. These include character masks, strategies for public self-presentation, and the stories you use to save face and earn acceptance. Like everyone, you are hardwired to avoid being rejected by peers or expelled from the inner circle of praise and social acceptance. In this chapter, you will come to understand how performance and idealization help to protect your reputation and ensure your place as a member in good standing of your chosen group. By investigating what it means to have enough, you can see the ways competition and comparison have helped to shape—and distort—your sense of status and self-worth.
We began our journey together with the story of a tiger cub raised by sheep. You learned that until you tell the truth about who you are, you’re condemned to living as an impostor behind a mask of fiction. You’ve learned that the question “Who am I?” is a powerful antidote to self-delusion. It helps you explore the stories you’ve used to survive, but that block you from revealing your true face. Now it’s time to look more closely at this social mask and explore how you can drop it by telling the truth.
It can be hard to admit we wear a mask at all. The most common questions students ask me are “Why do I feel like I’m an impostor?” and “What can I do to become more authentic?” Students complain that they don’t know who they really are, what they truly desire, and what their lives mean. They want to awaken from this trance of fraudulence and unworthiness. This is a universal condition that appears to have troubled our species from the start. How can we live as storytelling creatures without being trapped by our own stories? How can we use our brilliant conceptual minds and harness the genius of imagination—without losing ourselves behind concepts and images? Embedded in the human psyche is a universal desire for freedom. We suffer when we feel trapped by our lies because these untruths block us from expanding to our full potential.
What does it mean to drop our mask? Is it possible to live persona-free? Of course not. As social creatures moving among different groups, operating in various situations, no one should be expected to expose her whole self to the world. No person can be everything to everyone, and we compartmentalize for very good reasons. It’s unwise and potentially dangerous to share intimate details with a colleague, for example, or speak to parents, siblings, spouses, or children with the same raw candor we use with a therapist, priest, or confidant. Compartmentalization enables us to be flexible, multi-dimensional, and effective as we operate in various spheres in our life. These different compartments are not problematic—as long as we’re mindful of how we use them. It’s only when we forget that the mask isn’t us, or find that we’re unable to remove it, that role-playing becomes a prison.
Writing can help you recognize the value of the mask you’re wearing and, at the same time, maintain a half-inch of separation between you and this shifting persona. This allows the Witness to maintain perspective, and reminds you that you are the original face—the storyteller—and not the roles you play in the world. Grounded in this awareness, you’re able to simulate when you need to without losing contact with your real self.
Every mask has limitations, even the most attractive ones. Joe was a captain of industry who took great pride in his work to bring earth-friendly products to the marketplace. It was highly lucrative and Joe appeared to be living a classic success story, but he was miserable because he felt trapped behind a mask of professional affluence.
Somewhere along the way, I got lost. I was detoured by my own ambition. I got so used to playing that part—Progressive Entrepreneur Makes Good—that I forgot it wasn’t the whole story. In school, I studied philosophy. That was my first love. In the name of building my company, I ditched that whole side of who I am. Then my heart gave out and nothing made sense.
As he recovered from a stress-induced heart attack, Joe decided to jump ship. He sold his company, gave away his belongings, and moved to a Zen Buddhist monastery in upstate New York. Joe threw himself into his spiritual training and eventually his teacher invited Joe to become a lay monk. He shaved his head, gave up sex and alcohol, and turned entirely to dharma practice. For two years, Joe devoted the same level of dedication, focus, and enthusiasm to spiritual life that he had once focused on his business.
Then Joe became painfully aware that something was missing from this role as well. On a daily basis, he found himself wrestling with a growing sense of impostorhood. While he tried to follow his teacher’s advice to view this malaise as an ego distraction, Joe was unable to shake the feeling that this new mask wasn’t quite himself either. He longed for something more flexible than the role he’d stepped into at the monastery.
It was like wearing a costume that didn’t fit. I could get by as long as I didn’t try moving too freely. But as soon as I wanted to stretch, the costume stopped me. The role only allowed so much movement. I had exchanged one set of clothes for another. The costume wasn’t me. I couldn’t grow because the robe was too tight.
Joe finally left the monastery. He decided to try the middle way by seeing if it was possible to take what he loved about Buddhism —simplicity, meditation, and self-inquiry—and combine it with his business acumen to create positive change in the world. Joe turned his attention to funding a center for social activism and a small, drop-in meditation center for the local community. He described how this middle way changed his approach.
I still wear a mask, but it comes off at night. When I leave my office, it stays there. I know it’s not who I really am, as much as I love what I’m doing now. One day, I’ll probably wake up and need to change this role again to explore other parts of myself. But it won’t come as such a shock. I don’t need this role to give me value. The Buddha said all things are impermanent. That includes the part I’m playing.
Joe broke free from the myth that any role would satisfy him forever. He acknowledged that there is no such thing as a permanent persona. When you uncover this truth in your life, and realize you are the unchanging Witness behind shifting personas, you become able to play your parts without thinking that they contain you. These deepening practices will help you make this distinction and reveal the gap between you and the roles you play in your life.
We develop different personas, or masks, in life to interact with various social groups and situations.
Some masks are necessary and useful, and others can conflict with our authentic self. This causes us to feel disconnected from who we are.
Every mask has limitations. While some personas are easier to wear, every role will eventually stifle you.
By cultivating Witness awareness, we realize that we are the original face and not the mask. We are the storyteller and not the stories.
These questions will help you peel back the layers to differentiate yourself from the roles you play. Dropping them comes as a great relief.
Roles enable us to fit into social groups that offer protection and support. The drive to remain on the inside of a social circle is among our most primitive motivations as communal creatures who need one another to survive. It’s important to look at what we do to fit into the circle, and to see the masks in action.
We wear our masks as a condition of social life and acceptance by our peers. Our greatest fear is to be expelled from the groups we belong to—whether tribe, profession, country, or clique. This drive to remain inside the circle is an instinct that was hardwired into our ancestors’ brains when the world was full of saber-toothed tigers and becoming an outcast meant certain death. Though the threats have changed, our Paleolithic fear remains as urgent as ever.
If you look at your life objectively, you will see this dynamic at work. As a child, you were taught to obey and behave in order to belong. As an insecure teenager, you probably directed a good deal of energy into not sticking out, not being an outsider, and meeting the standards of your peers. As a young adult, your affiliations expanded to include career and romance, with all the conformity those roles demand. In both areas—work and love—you learned that loyalty to the group or to the couple was vital to furthering your prospects and ensuring your happiness. Through the years, your social memberships may have expanded as children came along, you became involved in political or religious institutions, or took on new hobbies. Each circle of involvement brings its own sense of duty and belonging. Together, these affiliations form your social identity.
But here’s the problem: in-groups always create out-groups. The shadow side of solidarity is an us-versus-them mentality. This is perhaps our greatest albatross as tribal beings. Our brain is wired to believe that members of other groups are automatically less deserving—for no other reason than that they’re not us. This is how war and atrocities happen. It’s also how we may compromise ourselves out of loyalty to a particular group with values that conflict with our integrity.
James was a social chameleon. In class, he was mostly silent and when he did speak up it was always to heartily agree with something someone else said. In his writing, however, James revealed that he often disagreed with the others’ comments. He admitted that this two-faced approach resulted from a terror of offending people and wrote, “My mother always told me that if you don’t have anything good to say about people, don’t say anything at all.” Consequently, he’d constructed a public persona that said one thing to suit the moment, while hiding the rest of James in a shadow. This shadow spoke out loud and clear when James shared his internal monologue regarding his classmates.
I hate all this feel-good crap, with people telling themselves how special they are for some stupid breakthrough. C’mon! The world is going to hell and we’re worrying about our inner child? How can we be so self-absorbed? Of course, I get the irony of writing this in a class about self-exploration. That’s probably why I hate myself most. I don’t walk the talk. I scream in my head and don’t change a thing. I’m too afraid to rock the boat. When you rock the boat, you lose everything. I found that out when I was fifteen and I told my mother what I thought about the way my father verbally abused her. I told her he was a drunken liar, that she should lock the door and call the cops. She told me to mind my own business and if I didn’t like it I could leave. So, I learned to keep what I thought to myself.
I invited James to share this story with the others. Reluctantly, he agreed. His classmates were sympathetic and helpful. One woman asked him if there were things he wanted to say in class that he kept to himself. This was his moment of truth. Would he be honest or would he be loyal? James wrote:
Yes. I have left many things unsaid. I can’t say they are very important—after the fact, they don’t seem to matter. Mostly, they are wicked judgments of things you shared that threatened me. All this talk about transformation—I sometimes think it’s useless. That’s my honest opinion. It’s also a giant self-defense. The point is, I don’t need to muzzle myself. You’re not my family and I don’t need you to like me. I hope you do, but that’s not my business. My business is to live free from fear.
James saw through his toxic story that being honest meant being expelled from the group. He learned that when you interrupt your compulsion to be a loyal insider, you see that you can stand on your own. You realize that you can make honest choices based on self-reliance and a healthy level of transparency. These deepening questions will help you reveal your own fears about being an outcast and the lengths you’ll go to for acceptance.
We develop our masks as ways to stay on the inside of the groups we belong to.
Each group has a consensus reality, which is the communal story and version of reality that a particular culture or group believes to be real.
Leaving a particular group can bring greater awareness to the story of that group and your relationship to that story.
When you awaken to your own self-reliance, you begin to make honest choices that are uncensored by the fear of disapproval.
When you recognize how much of your public mask is based on narratives of loyalty and belonging, you also see how much of your life is centered on performance and struggling to meet an ideal. The stress and disenchantment this causes can lead you to adopt an inflated persona that is as unsustainable as it is dishonest. This is why performance and idealization are adaptive forces in social life that need to be looked at.
It’s not news that we live in a meritocratic, achievement-driven culture that is based on getting ahead and staying there. As players in this competitive game, we’re brainwashed into believing that we’re only as good as who we know, what we do, and where we live, work, shop, worship, and stand in relation to others. By believing our identity rests on how others perceive us, we spend our lives protecting this image, polishing it to get ahead, repairing it when it’s damaged, and moving as fast as we can to keep our personas in place.
Obsessed with this created image and what psychologists call “reputation management,” you grow accustomed to thinking of life as performance. “How am I doing?” we ask ourselves each day. “Do I seem okay?” “Am I measuring up?” “Am I viewed as a failure or as a success?” “Do others believe my performance?” Driven to appear happy, successful, and strong—to perform at your highest capacity—you may find yourself feeling like a failure without knowing exactly why. Regardless of how much you produce, you still don’t feel like you’re quite enough.
Caught in this cycle of performance and idealization, you may doubt your own authenticity. But how others see you is not who you are. What you do, make, earn, or produce don’t determine your value as a human being. The belief that they do is symptomatic of living in a doing versus a being culture. In a doing culture, idleness is considered a waste of time and activities that don’t produce material results—including introspection, spiritual practice, and writing—are not valued as meaningful efforts. For your life to matter, you must keep performing, proving, and profiting. You struggle to become somebody rather than nobody—an effort based on competition and self-judgment. You may succeed in pleasing others for a while, but sooner or later the whole effort crumbles.
In being cultures, it’s a different story. Societies that promote spiritual values over material ones emphasize happiness as your human birthright. Your life doesn’t have to be earned—you were born worthy. It’s understood that your true identity has nothing to do with external markers and cannot be taken away. No achievement, approval, or status is required in order to be loved. This isn’t to say that effort, productivity, and engagement with the world don’t matter. They simply have nothing to do with your intrinsic value. Being cultures remind us that performance isn’t the focus of existence. Instead, what matters in life are loving, appreciating, caring for others, creating for the sake of wisdom and beauty, and awakening to the basic gift of life.
At fifty, Gary had not yet absorbed this lesson. He was as driven, insecure, and obsessed with public image as he had been in adolescence. Having grown up poor, he was a self-made man haunted by a fear of losing it all. This fear kept Gary anxious, with both feet glued to his hamster wheel, even though he wasn’t enjoying his life. At the beginning of our work together, Gary’s self-description rattled off the highlights of his resume and family life, never touching his inner life or who he was. Gary viewed himself as an earner first, a husband second, a father third, and a person last. Defined by these roles, he had never stopped pushing long enough to look at who he actually was. I encouraged Gary to explore his beliefs through writing, and he saw clearly how one-dimensional his ideas about manhood were—how obsessed with performance and idealization. It was all doing with no time for being. He desperately needed to take a break.
For the next six months, writing became Gary’s door into his private creative refuge. He wrote about secret desires, unexplored passions, and the need to prove he was somebody. When I asked Gary to write about what his father had taught him about being a man, he finally spilled the beans.
The last time I saw my father, he was in a coffin in the back of a hearse after somebody dumped his body into the Hudson River. They told us he jumped but I know he was murdered. My father ran numbers for a mob in Hell’s Kitchen. What did he teach me? Nothing. Except how not to be when I grew up. I loved my dad, but the only lesson he taught me was, “You come from the wrong side of the tracks. Never think you’re one of them because it can all get taken away tomorrow.” I always feel like a failure inside, but cover it up by staying busy. I’ve been avoiding myself the best I can.
After rereading this passage and writing about how it felt to state it, Gary started to see himself differently. He could write more openly, especially about his bottomless love for his wife and children, whose happiness gave him a reason for living. Gary came to realize that, as much as he loved them, his family could no longer be his sole raison d’être for living. It was time for Gary to figure out what else might bring him satisfaction. A month after the class ended, Gary wrote to say that he’d just returned from a one-hundred mile solo bike ride in the mountains of Grand Teton National Park.
I never thought I could do this! Take time for myself to just enjoy something. My wife thinks it’s great. I’m getting to know the kids better, too. I’m not so angry and tired all the time. I can honestly say that I’ve never felt better. I still write, especially when I get stressed out and forget that everything’s okay, and I’m learning not to push so hard. I don’t need to prove myself anymore.
Having told the truth about how unhappy he was, Gary saw through his desperate need to perform. This helped him learn to relax and drop the mask of the ideal man, the success story, the pillar of strength.
Most people live in a state of “reputation management,” maintaining and protecting their self-created image.
In doing cultures, personal value is based on achievement, whereas in being cultures, one’s spiritual life is valued over materialism.
Performance isn’t the focus of existence, being here is.
By dropping the myth of performance and achievement, we can begin to see and accept ourselves for who we truly are.
These deepening practices will help you identify where you overperform in your life, striving for unsustainable ideals.
Underlying the need to perform are feelings of insufficiency. Some of these are socially created; they are real expectations from those around you. Others are entirely self-generated and stem from an existential source. As we look at what self-sufficiency means, you can begin to explore the reality that you are already more than enough.
Living with trust in your own self-worth is a transformative, emotional practice. Admirable as it is to be productive, challenge yourself, and do good in the world, achievement driven by a sense of unworthiness brings diminishing returns. It contributes to feelings of emptiness that no amount of effort can soothe.
In Buddhism, this unfillable void is illustrated with the character of the Hungry Ghost, a symbolic being with a pin-sized mouth and huge belly who is starving because it cannot be fed. The Hungry Ghost represents the ego’s ravenous, delusional story that the more you have, the more you need; the more you do, the more seems undone; the harder you work at becoming whole, the more partial and fragmented you feel. You’re so busy grabbing for more that you miss what you already have and can never feel satiated.
By learning to be present and pay attention, we can mute the Hungry Ghost monologue and make way for the small, still voice within that whispers, “You are already enough.” Instead of feeling desperate, unhappy, and famished, we can listen to the voice of the Witness and stay curious, interested, and enthusiastic. The Greek root of the word “enthusiasm” means “divinely inspired.” To be filled with inspiration in life is the antidote to feeling so empty. Enthusiasm is an eager “yes” to life, an open door to experience. Rather than fearing you’ll never get there, make it, or live your best life, you’re grateful to be where you are. You discover that when you say yes to life on its own terms, existence can remain evergreen and full—even when things don’t go your way. Every time you say yes, you begin again.
It is an ongoing spiritual practice to recognize the fullness of being and the voices that block you from feeling content. To identify these voices, investigate their stories in writing. What are they telling you about what’s missing in your life? What do you need in order to be happy, worthy, and part of the crowd? You’ll be amazed by how deluded they are once you get their voices down on paper.
Achievement driven by a sense of unworthiness can contribute to feelings of emptiness.
By always striving for more, we miss the miracle of what’s right in front of us in this already-perfect moment.
The Greek root of the word “enthusiasm” means “divinely inspired.” To be filled with inspiration is the antidote to emptiness.
When you say yes to life on its own terms, existence remains evergreen, perpetually fresh and interesting. Every time you say yes, you begin again.
These exercises will help you tease out these damaging messages and how they take hold of your psyche.
Your answers to these questions can liberate you from the myth of insufficiency that keeps you struggling for more. They prepare you to take the next step on this journey of awakening: to embrace the law of impermanence and the sacred power of surrender.