Why I'm Writing This

That quiet, constant sense that you are only as good as your last performance

I want to tell you what this is, and what it isn’t, before you decide whether to stay.

This is not a place where I’m going to tell you how to fix your life in five steps. There are plenty of those, and if they worked, you and I would both be finished by now. I’ve read them, and even written my own private versions of them. I’ve made detailed plans to become a calmer, freer, less driven person, and then worn myself out trying to execute the plan, (which if you think about it is its own kind of joke).

What this is, instead, is one person writing honestly about a thing a lot of us are caught in and don’t have a name for: The quiet, constant sense that you are only as good as your last performance; that your worth is something you have to keep earning, every day, and that the day you stop earning it is the day you find out it was never really yours to keep. Psychologists have a name for it—performance-based identity.

I lived inside that for the first couple of decades of my life, and it took me a long time and a lot of help to find my way out. I’m not writing from the finish line. I’m writing from the recovery side of the table, the place where you sit with other people who are also still working it out, and you tell the truth about where you actually are, without keeping score. I spent more than twenty years in rooms like that, and most of what I know I learned there, slowly, while I wasn’t trying to learn anything.

So here’s what you can expect from me: An essay most weeks in plain language. No hype, no urgency, and no manufactured crisis to get you to click. Sometimes it’ll be about the psychology of the Performance Trap. Sometimes it will be about faith, since I’m a Christian and I love sharing what God has done in my life and those care about. Sometimes I will just share a small true thing I noticed.

If you’re tired of trying to prove you’re enough, to a boss or a parent or your own reflection, then I think you’ll recognize yourself here. And if you’re not sure whether any of this is for you, that’s fine too.

I’m glad you’re here.

---