What Comes After You Finally Stop Performing

Here is something nobody warned me about. When you finally stop performing the version of yourself that you have been performing for most of your adult life, the first thing that happens is not relief. The first thing that happens is that you have no idea what to do with your hands. 

I am being a little flip about this, but I am also being serious. The performing has occupied your hands. The performing has occupied your mouth. The performing has occupied your face, your tone of voice, the particular angle at which you tilt your head when someone is telling you a story you have heard before. When the performing stops, all of those parts of you go suddenly quiet, and the quiet is so unfamiliar that you do not know how to be a person inside it. You sit at a dinner party. You do not know what your face is supposed to be doing. You do not know how engaged to look. You do not know whether to laugh at the joke that you would have laughed at automatically six months ago, and now you are aware that you do not actually find it funny, and you are not sure what to do with the not-finding-it-funny because you have never let it register before. 

This is the strange season I want to write about. The season after the performing has stopped, but before whatever comes next has arrived. The in-between season. The one nobody mentions in the books about authenticity and finding yourself, because the books want to skip to the part where you have arrived somewhere recognizable and your life looks beautiful. The in-between season is not beautiful. The in-between season is mostly awkward. You are walking around inside a life that no longer fits in the way it used to fit, and the new fit has not yet developed, and in the meantime you are just sort of bumping into furniture you used to navigate without thinking. 

The first thing I noticed, when I stopped performing, was that I did not know what I liked anymore. 

This sounds like a problem someone in their twenties would have. It is not. It is a problem a lot of women have in their forties when they finally stop doing whatever they were doing to be acceptable to whoever they were doing it for. I would stand in a coffee shop and look at the menu and realize I had no idea which drink I actually wanted. I had been ordering whatever seemed quickest, or whatever was popular, or whatever made me look like someone who had it together, for so long that the question of what I actually wanted had become inaccessible. The barista would ask me what I wanted. I would feel a small panic. I would order something. I would drink it. I would not know whether I liked it. 

The accumulated effect of years of not asking yourself what you actually want is that the asking muscle has atrophied. You have to rebuild it. The rebuilding starts with small things. Coffee orders. Whether you want to go to the dinner. Whether you actually like the sweater. The small things are practice. The small things are how you teach yourself, again, that you are allowed to have preferences, that your preferences are allowed to be specific, that you are allowed to want one thing more than another thing even when no one else has indicated which thing you should want. 

I am about a year into this practice now. I have gotten better at coffee orders. I am still not great at the larger questions. I still find myself, when someone asks me what I want to do this weekend, hesitating before answering, because the old habit of figuring out what they want before saying what I want is so deeply trained that I have to interrupt it deliberately every single time. The interrupting gets easier. The interrupting is not yet automatic. 

The second thing I noticed, when I stopped performing, was that the people in my life responded to the new version of me in ways I had not anticipated. 

I had expected the responses to be dramatic. I had expected confrontations. I had expected to lose friendships, alienate family members, produce some kind of visible disruption that I would then have to manage. What actually happened was much quieter and somehow much more disorienting. Some people did not notice the change at all. They continued to interact with me as if I were still performing, which I was not, which produced a strange asymmetry in the conversations that they did not seem to register. I would say things I would not have said a year ago, and they would respond as if I had said the things I would have said a year ago, and I would walk away from the conversation feeling like we had been in different rooms. 

Other people noticed and did not like it. They did not say so directly. They communicated it in small adjustments. Fewer invitations. Shorter texts. A particular kind of cool friendliness that had not been there before. I noticed. I felt the noticing. I did not know what to do with the noticing for several months, until I realized that what I was experiencing was the natural recalibration that happens when you stop being who people had been relying on you to be. They had been relying on a particular version of me. The version is no longer available. They have not yet decided whether the new version is one they want to know. Many of them will eventually decide yes. Some of them will decide no. The deciding is theirs, and I am not in charge of it, and I have had to make my peace with the not being in charge of it, which is not the same thing as not caring. 

A few people noticed and were delighted. These are the people whose presence I now treasure in a way that I did not entirely treasure them before. They are the people who had been waiting for me to stop performing, who had suspected there was someone underneath the performance and were curious to meet her, and who are now meeting her with the kind of warmth that you cannot fake and cannot manufacture. The friendships I have with these people are different than the friendships I had before. They are deeper. They are also less practiced, because we are figuring out, together, how to be friends in this new configuration. The figuring out is awkward and good. The figuring out is the thing I had been missing for years without knowing I was missing it. 

The third thing I noticed, when I stopped performing, was that my body relaxed in ways I had not known it had been tense. 

I have written about this elsewhere, so I will not repeat it at length. What I will say is that the relaxation was not the kind of relaxation I had been chasing through bubble baths and yoga classes and meditation apps. The relaxation came from somewhere underneath all of those things, somewhere closer to the structure of how I held myself in the world. My jaw stopped clenching at night. My shoulders dropped about an inch and stayed there. My breathing went deeper without me trying to make it deeper. The accumulated tension of having been on for decades began to release without me doing anything to release it. The release was not pleasant in the way I had expected. It was more like the way a hand cramps when you finally put down something you have been gripping too tightly, and then slowly, painfully, opens. The opening is what you wanted. The opening also hurts. 

There is something I want to say about grief here, because the in-between season has more grief in it than most people warn you about. 

You grieve the woman you were. Even though she was not your real self. Even though the performance was costing you. Even though you would not go back. There is still a grief that arrives when you set down the version of yourself you have been performing, because she was, for all her flaws, the version of you that the world recognized. She was the version that had friends. The version that got the promotions. The version that your mother understood. Setting her down is necessary. Setting her down also means letting go of the recognition she had built up, which is not nothing, and you have to grieve that recognition even as you are choosing to let it go. 

You grieve the people who do not make the transition with you. The ones who liked the old version and have no interest in knowing the new one. They are not bad people, in most cases. They are just people who had a particular relationship with the woman you were performing, and the relationship cannot continue in the same form when the performance ends. Some of them you will miss. The missing is real even when the choice to move on was the right one. Grief and rightness can occupy the same space. They almost always do. 

You grieve the years you spent performing. The years you cannot get back. The relationships that might have been deeper if you had been there in your actual form rather than in the form you had constructed. The work you might have done if you had not spent so much energy maintaining the performance. The conversations you might have had. The version of your life that might have been possible if you had figured this out at thirty rather than at forty-three. You do not get those years back. The grief about them is part of the price of finally being here. The grief does not have to be dramatic. It can be small and quiet and visit you at unexpected moments and pass through you without breaking anything. The grief is just part of the in-between season. It is not a sign that anything has gone wrong. 

What helps, during the in-between season, is a small and unglamorous list of things. I will share my list, with the understanding that yours will be different. 

What helps is letting the awkwardness be awkward without trying to fix it immediately. The performance was, in part, a way of avoiding awkwardness. Stopping the performance means accepting that you will be awkward sometimes, that conversations will not flow the way they used to, that you will not always have the right thing to say. The awkwardness is information. The awkwardness is part of how you learn to be present rather than polished. The awkwardness does not last forever. The awkwardness teaches you that you can survive being slightly uncomfortable in a social setting, which is one of the small permissions you may have been denying yourself for a long time. 

What helps is finding one or two other women who are also in their in-between seasons. Not women who have already arrived somewhere new. Not women who are still fully in the performance. Women who are in the middle, like you, who can talk about the awkwardness and the grief and the not knowing what to order at coffee shops. These conversations are some of the most useful conversations I have ever had. They are not therapy. They are not friendship in the usual sense. They are a particular kind of mutual recognition between women going through the same passage, and the recognition itself is restorative in ways that more polished interactions cannot be. 

What helps is paying attention to small returns of pleasure. The first time you eat something and notice you really like it. The first time you laugh at something and the laugh comes from somewhere real instead of from the performance laugh you used to produce. The first time you say something true in a conversation and the truth lands, even if it lands awkwardly. These small returns are evidence that the new version of you is in there, beginning to emerge. The emergence is slow. The emergence is real. 

What helps is patience. The in-between season is not a stage you can rush through. You cannot decide one day that the performance is over and arrive the next day at a fully formed authentic self. The arriving takes years. The arriving has stages and setbacks and quiet plateaus where nothing seems to be happening and then suddenly something shifts. The patience is hard because the in-between is uncomfortable. The patience is also necessary because the alternative is going back to the performance, which is what we have stopped doing, and which we cannot go back to without losing the ground we have gained. 

The thing I most want to say is that the woman on the other side of the in-between season is worth meeting. I am beginning to meet her now, in pieces, in small daily encounters with myself that feel different than they used to feel. She is quieter than the woman who came before her. She is also more substantial. She does not perform. She also does not, yet, fully know what to do with herself in all situations, but she is figuring it out, slowly, with humor, with patience, with the help of a few good friends who are also figuring out their own versions of the same question. 

If you are in the in-between, I am sitting at this kitchen table with you. The coffee is good. I made it for myself, in a cup I chose because I liked it. I do not know what comes next. I am beginning to suspect that the not knowing is part of what comes next, that the not knowing is where the actual life happens, that the woman who has stopped performing has set herself down into an uncertain but real existence that the performance had been protecting her from. The uncertainty is the price. The reality is the gift. I am taking both, awkwardly, day by day, one small choice at a time, and so are you, and that is, I think, the whole point of the in-between season. The point is to be here, not yet polished, not yet arrived, and to keep choosing it anyway.