You don’t necessarily know you’re unmasking because you suddenly feel confident.
Nobody hands you a certificate. There’s no morning where you wake up and think “ah yes, today I have shed the performance, I am now Authentically Myself.” That’s not how it works, and if you’ve been waiting for that morning, I want to gently tell you it’s probably not coming. Not like that.
What actually happens is smaller. Sideways. Almost embarrassing in how little it looks like progress.
Here’s how it tends to show up.
You find yourself Googling how migratory birds know which way is south, at 11pm, for no reason, and you don’t stop yourself. You doodle something pointless in the margin of a notebook that’s supposed to be for something else. You become obsessed with something for no obvious reason, a niche corner of medieval history, the exact shade of blue in a photo you took four years ago. You make a connection that doesn’t quite make sense yet, two things that shouldn’t touch, touching anyway, and you don’t know what to do with that yet, and that’s fine. You want to write something nobody asked for, something with no audience and no purpose and no plan. You get excited about an idea before you’ve decided whether it’s useful, whether it’s marketable, whether it will make anyone proud of you.
And instead of the old reflex, the one that used to arrive almost instantly:
That’s stupid.
Something quieter says:
Huh. That’s interesting.
That gap is the whole thing.
Why “that’s stupid” became the default setting
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