life is performance, get over it

:)

“There is a body that is a prison that you wish you could escape (low body confidence, self-esteem, etc), but then there is picturing your body as a house with lots of rooms. You can wander from room to room, and some doors you’ll never open. Some you might one day. But you’re always free to roam your body as home.” Ester Perel on Fashion Neuroses

I’ve been reading with insufferable characters lately. Deliberately. I find them more interesting, forcing my hand to scratch at my own insecurities and beliefs.

In Assembly, Natasha Brown’s protagonist, a third-generation British-Jamaican woman, does everything correctly. She exceeds every expectation, works harder, and works smarter. She is, by most metrics, a success. She is also so exhausted by her life of acceptability that when death arrives, it feels less like a tragedy and more like the first honest exit available to her. Brown writes it plainly: be invisible, imperceptible. Become the air. The performance wasn’t for success or even to be accepted because she never would be; it was for survival, and it consumed her anyway.

In Erin Somers’ The Ten Year Affair, the performance is different and, in some ways, more insidious because it comes from a position of privilege and safety. The white Brooklynite characters have the marriage, the career, and the house outside the city that they could finally afford. They have, by every legible metric, made it, and they are insufferable. Smug, restless, lifeless in the way that only people who chose comfort over meaning can be. The affair isn’t passion, it’s just drama to make life interesting, or an act to regain some kind of control because you’ve been sold a dream, but in reality, it’s a vanilla-flavoured nightmare. They didn’t lose themselves to a hostile world; they handed themselves over willingly and called it adulthood.

I found them annoying. And a mirror, because what they live is my deepest fear. The complacency of being together and pining for elsewhere because it’s better than being alone. The performance of a life so complete it leaves no room for actual living. It’s a fucking flatline.

I do qigong in the morning, swinging my arms like those annoying little kids that can’t seem to sit still when their guardian is trying to feed them. I decant ink into fountain pens and wonder what kind of iridescent blood-red should fill my extra-fine Kakuno pen. I then write sentences into my commonplace journal, and for a moment, I think I’m the most interesting person in the world. I’d also like to note that I have a robust journal ecosystem. Every notebook serves a very important purpose.

I sip tepid Nescafé because I’m too lazy to use my French press or milk frother. Too much work. I go to work, switch on my screens, fall into a sea of frameworks and methodologies, and diligently pluck the humanity within to create a true story. Or one take of a true story, because people are infinite projections despite what the data tries to force feed you.

On weekends, I fall asleep on the couch, sun burning my cheeks, cats nipping at my feet. When I’m playing with my oil pastels, I wonder how much of it is genuine pleasure and how much is my need to unlock a new creative hobby so I can say I have one. I play Sudoku. I listen to jazz, Icelandic ambient music, and YouTube playlists of the most random sorts. I’m currently reading Nana on my Kobo, learning to watercolour, and frustrated by how terrible I am at it. I walk on my treadmill so I’m not completely inert. I watch films from Mubi, ignore Letterboxd recommendations because I find them infuriating, and watch kdramas to disassociate.

I see my friends, spend time with my siblings, swipe right but often left, kiss a few frogs and on occasion host people in my home, where we talk about rest and leisure and what it means to actually live. I took a course on happiness at Yale once, because I needed to believe I could source my own form of joy.

This is all incredibly fun to me.

How much of it is me, and how much of it has been sold to me as what I’m supposed to do?

Esther Perel says creativity and play are medicine for trauma. That eventually you become more able to take risks, and that’s how you know you’re doing better. Which reframes the whole list, the qigong arms, the iridescent ink, the watercolour I’m genuinely terrible at, not as leisure or performance or identity curation but as my body quietly learning to take risks again. In small increments, on its own terms. Brilliant.

To go back to the books, Assembly sat with me in an uncomfy way. Brown writes about assimilation, the pressure to dissolve yourself, pour into the mould, bend your bones until they splinter, and you fit. “Disappear, they say. Encouraging at first. Then frowning. Then again and again.” This idea of perfect tokenism that rewards the right kind of diversity, and the exhaustion of day-to-day microaggressions, never belonging to the only place you know, immigrant guilt and navigating class.

I wondered, would Toronto have forced my hand into that performance? Of course it would have. And then the more uncomfortable question underneath it, why do I think I’m exempt from it here?

Dubai has given me a different kind of freedom. The expat life, creative class, distance from the specific weight of being a Black woman in a Canadian city, trying to prove she belongs. But Dubai has its own performance and its own assimilation. It’s the power of the passport and the wallet, and there is a rule book of how to disappear and dissolve.

Life is a performance, and it always has been.
The question was never whether I’m performing, it’s whether I’m performing for myself or for someone else’s idea of me. Assembly’s protagonist performed for a world that would never accept her, regardless. Cora performed for a world that she found hollow. I’ve done versions of both. I’m done with either.

What I’m doing now, the ink, the pastels, the tepid Nescafé, the Rest in Leisure events, this essay, might be half-borrowed from aesthetics I admired somewhere along the way. Probably is, but I’m the one decanting the blood red into the extra fine nib. I’m the one wandering the rooms.

Some doors I’ll never open.
Some I might one day.

But I’m always free to roam.

Find me here:


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