Nobody prepares you for the best part of getting older – the moment you realise you’d rather be disliked for who you actually are than spend one more year being liked for the exhausting performance you’ve been giving since your twenties
There’s a moment somewhere in your mid-thirties – not a dramatic one, not a crisis, more like a slow exhale you didn’t know you were holding – where you realise you’d rather be disliked for who you actually are than spend one more year being liked for the performance. One more year of calibrating yourself to the room. One more year of being the version of you that makes everyone comfortable while the real one sits behind glass wondering when it’s his turn.
I hit that moment at thirty-five. Not because something happened. Because nothing happened. I was at a work function, being the version of myself I’d been deploying in professional settings for over a decade – agreeable, engaged, saying the right things to the right people at the right moments – and I caught myself mid-sentence in a conversation I didn’t care about, performing enthusiasm I didn’t feel, and I thought: I’m so tired of this person. Not the person I was talking to. The person I was being.
That’s the best part of getting older that nobody prepares you for. Not the greying hair or the creaking knees or the way hangovers now last three days instead of three hours. The good part. The part where the performance you’ve been maintaining since your early twenties starts to feel heavier than the consequences of dropping it. And you drop it. Not all at once. But enough to notice. Enough to change things.
The performance years
My twenties were almost entirely performance. I don’t say that with bitterness – I think most people’s twenties are. You’re building an identity from scratch, trying on versions of yourself, figuring out which one gets the best response. It’s normal. It’s developmental. It’s also completely exhausting, and the problem is that most of us don’t stop doing it when the developmental phase ends. We just get better at it. The performance becomes seamless. The mask becomes the face. And by your late twenties, you’ve built a social identity so polished and so consistent that you’ve forgotten it’s a construction.
My construction was the easy one. Easy to be around. Easy to talk to. Easy to like. I was warm without being vulnerable, interesting without being challenging, present without being complicated. I agreed with things I didn’t agree with because disagreement created friction. I laughed at things that weren’t funny because not laughing created awkwardness. I made myself available for people and situations that drained me because unavailability might mean being excluded, and exclusion was the worst thing I could imagine.
The worst thing I could imagine. That’s worth sitting with. At twenty-five, the prospect of being disliked – of someone forming a negative opinion of me based on who I actually was – was so threatening that I’d restructured my entire personality to prevent it. Not consciously. Not with a deliberate plan. Just the accumulated effect of a thousand small adjustments, each one designed to smooth an edge or soften a position or make myself a little more palatable to the people around me.
By thirty, the construction was complete. Everyone liked me. And I had no idea who I was.
What getting older does to the mask
Getting older does something to your tolerance for your own nonsense. I can’t explain the mechanism exactly – maybe it’s neurological, maybe it’s the accumulation of evidence that the things you feared don’t actually kill you, maybe it’s just fatigue. But somewhere in your thirties, the energy required to maintain the performance starts exceeding the energy you have available. The mask gets heavy. Not metaphorically. You can feel it. The physical weight of being someone you’re not in every room you enter, every conversation you have, every interaction that requires you to override your actual response and produce the acceptable one instead.
For me, the weight became noticeable around thirty-three. Small moments where the mask would slip – an honest opinion delivered without the usual softening, a social invitation declined without the usual elaborate excuse, a moment of visible irritation where I would have previously performed patience. Each slip felt dangerous. Each one was followed by a jolt of anxiety – they’ll think I’m difficult, they’ll think I’m rude, they won’t like me anymore.
But here’s what actually happened after each slip: nothing. Nobody recoiled. Nobody excommunicated me. The honest opinion was received and responded to. The declined invitation was accepted without drama. The visible irritation was noted and the conversation adjusted. The consequences I’d spent fifteen years structuring my entire personality to avoid turned out to be, in almost every case, trivially small. A moment of mild surprise from someone used to the agreeable version. A brief recalibration. And then life continued, completely unchanged, except that I felt about ten kilograms lighter.
The first time I chose discomfort over performance
There was a specific moment I think of as the turning point, though the turn had been happening gradually for months. A friend asked me to do something I didn’t want to do. Not something unreasonable – a weekend trip with a group of people I was lukewarm about to a place I had no interest in visiting. The old me would have said yes. Would have gone. Would have spent the entire weekend performing enjoyment while internally counting the hours until I could leave. Would have come home exhausted and resentful and told myself it was fine because everyone had a good time.
I said no. Not “maybe” or “let me check my schedule” or “I’d love to but I can’t” – the usual buffering language I used to soften every refusal into something that barely registered as a refusal. Just no. I don’t want to go. I’d rather stay home.
The silence on the other end lasted about four seconds. Then my friend said “fair enough” and moved on. That was it. No interrogation. No wounded feelings. No consequence of any kind. Four seconds of silence and the world continued to turn.
Those four seconds of silence were the loudest thing I’d heard in years. Because in those four seconds, I felt the full weight of what I’d been doing to myself. Every yes I’d said when I meant no. Every weekend spent performing. Every interaction where I’d chosen their comfort over my honesty. All of it, pressing down on me, visible for the first time because I’d finally done the one thing I’d been too afraid to do: I’d let someone experience the real version of my response instead of the curated one. And the real version was fine. It was more than fine. It was honest. And honesty, it turned out, was something I’d been starving for without knowing what to call the hunger.
What you gain when you stop performing
The first thing you gain is time. Not calendar time – though you gain that too, when you stop saying yes to things you don’t want to do. Mental time. The hours you used to spend rehearsing interactions, analysing how you came across, worrying about what someone thought of something you said – those hours come back to you. They’re just yours now. To think with, to rest with, to fill with things you actually care about instead of things you’re managing.
The second thing you gain is relationships that are real. This was the unexpected part. I’d assumed that dropping the performance would cost me relationships – that the people who liked the agreeable version of me would leave when they met the actual one. Some did. Not many, but some. The friendships that were built entirely on my agreeableness dissolved when the agreeableness was withdrawn, and their dissolution was the clearest confirmation I could have received that those relationships had never been for me. They’d been for the character I was playing.
The friendships that survived got deeper. Dramatically, noticeably deeper. Because when you stop performing, you give the other person permission to stop performing too. The whole dynamic shifts. Conversations get more honest. Disagreements become possible – and survivable. The relationship stops being a mutual performance of pleasantness and becomes an actual exchange between actual people. It’s less comfortable than the performance. It’s also the only version that nourishes anything.
The third thing you gain – and this is the one that surprised me most – is energy. Physical, tangible energy. I hadn’t realised how much of my daily fatigue was generated not by my work or my schedule but by the constant, low-level effort of maintaining the performance. When that effort stopped, I had reserves I didn’t know existed. Not boundless energy – I’m still a thirty-seven-year-old with a full life. But enough to notice. Enough to wonder where it had been all those years, and to know the answer: it had been feeding the mask.
The fear that was never real
The thing I was afraid of for fifteen years – being disliked for who I actually am – has happened. Not often. Not dramatically. But it’s happened. There are people who preferred the old version. People who found the agreeable, always-available, never-complicated Lachlan easier to deal with. People who experienced my increased honesty as decreased warmth, my boundaries as rejection, my actual opinions as an unwelcome complication in a dynamic they’d been enjoying precisely because it asked nothing of them.
I lost those people. And the loss, which I’d spent fifteen years dreading, turned out to be one of the most clarifying experiences of my adult life. Because losing people who only liked the performance tells you exactly what the relationship was worth. And knowing what your relationships are worth – really worth, stripped of the performance and the accommodation and the careful maintenance of other people’s comfort – is information you can actually build a life on.
The people who stayed – the ones who met the real version and didn’t flinch – those are the relationships I’m building on now. Not many. Enough. Built on the understanding that I’m not always easy, not always agreeable, not always the version of myself that makes the room comfortable. And that’s okay. Because the room’s comfort was never my responsibility. It just felt like it was, for a very long time, because I’d been trained to believe that my value was measured by other people’s ease.
The gift nobody tells you about
Getting older has given me many things, most of them less dramatic than the culture would have you believe. Grey hairs. A lower tolerance for late nights. The ability to leave a party at nine-thirty without apologising. A growing indifference to what strangers think of me, expanding gradually to include what acquaintances think of me, and narrowing the circle of people whose opinions I actually carry to a small, trusted, hand-countable group.
But the real gift – the one nobody prepares you for because it can’t be described in advance, only recognised in retrospect – is the death of the need to be liked. Not the desire. I still want to be liked. I’m human. But the need – the compulsive, overriding, personality-shaping need that ran my life for fifteen years – that’s gone. It died somewhere between thirty-three and thirty-seven, quietly, without ceremony, replaced by something sturdier and less frantic: the preference to be known.
Being liked is about their experience of you. Being known is about the truth of you reaching another person. One requires performance. The other requires honesty. And getting older, for all its indignities, has given me the one thing I needed to choose honesty over performance: the bone-deep understanding that the worst-case scenario I’d been avoiding my entire adult life – someone not liking who I actually am – is survivable. More than survivable. It’s the price of admission to a life that actually belongs to you.
I’m 37. I’d rather be disliked. Not by everyone. Not carelessly. But honestly. By the people who meet the real version and decide he’s not for them. That’s fine. That’s information. That’s the natural sorting process of a life lived without a mask.
The mask was heavier than anything the sorting has cost me. And putting it down – finally, imperfectly, irreversibly putting it down – is the best thing getting older has done for me.
Nobody told me this was coming. I wish someone had. Not because it would have made the performance years shorter – some lessons can only be learned on schedule. But because it would have given me something to look forward to during all those years of being liked by everyone and known by no one.
This. This is what was coming. And it was worth the wait.
