The Loss of Performative Identity

“Because we can’t watch ourselves... Not like we need to."

Rachel Megan Barker does too many things to know how to easily write a bio, but her life features a lot of politics and some community organizing, education policy, music and theatre whilst bouncing back and forth between two continents. Today she offers insights into what happens when you have a performative identity and no one to perform to.

by Rachel Megan Barker

I do not believe that all humans function in the same way. This is not me trying to write a relatable piece about a universal experience. This is just me, writing about me.

So much of my experience in the world feels performative. There is a line from the play Trestle At Pope Lick Creek, which I love: “Because we can’t watch ourselves... Not like we need to.”

Something that has become very clear during social isolation is that my sense of self is in large part relational; I feel like who I am is how I act in the world and how I am perceived by other people.

And so to be cut off from that is a pretty big shift.

And I don’t fully know why that experience cannot be replaced with Zoom and Twitter and phone calls. 

Of course, in so many ways it is much easier to maintain a performative identity in the current context. When your identity is so deeply shaped by how people see you in the moment, it is also deeply affected when you fall short; when you aren’t as sharp or as funny or as well dressed - whatever it is - as you want to be, your sense of self can take quite a hit.

That might sound awfully melodramatic, but it’s not that I come out of every meeting where I stumbled over trying to make a point feeling terrible about myself. It’s more that I experience dissonance when my self-image of someone who says necessary things in a likeable and articulate manner comes into contrast with the reality of me, stumbling over my point in that meeting. It’s jarring.

Interacting with the world either in a more curated fashion, through social media, or in bitesize chunks through the lenses of Zoom or Teams or whatever video chat we are using on that day of the week, means that what people do see of you is easier to align with how you want them to see you.

But there is also something very physical about my sense of identity.

Me sitting by myself just feels different to me in the world. There is a dissociated quality to it; a surreality.

Maybe it’s something to do with having been a theatre kid growing up. “All the world’s a stage” and all that. I am used to most of my time happening in a space where people can see me.

And I mean, I do love being by myself. But this much of it has, not to sound overzealously deep, made me face who I am without spending a large amount of my weeks seeing myself, in part, through the eyes of others - or at least through my perception of their perception of me.

And honestly, I am not sure where that leaves me. I would love to be able to say “and this is how I have come to be happy with myself, just as I am, without a world around me to perform to” but that wouldn’t be true. Really, where I am at is just an awareness. That after a while, without time in the world, there is a real emptiness that I don’t yet know how to fill. Me, without a world to perform in, feels...I wish I had a word less melodramatic than inadequate. It just makes me feel like I am not quite enough.