Everything Started Feeling Like Performance

On forgetting how to just exist

I don’t even know when life turned into something I started performing instead of actually living, but I can feel it in every single thing I do now. It is in the way I wake up already tired without doing anything yet. It is in the way my brain starts throwing tasks at me before I even fully become conscious. There is always something waiting. Something I should fix. Something I should complete. Something I should be ahead on. It never feels like I am starting a day. It feels like I am entering a race that never had a starting point.

And what annoys me the most is how normal this is made to look. Everyone around me is doing something, building something, pushing something, and it creates this silent pressure that I am supposed to match it all the time. Even when I am doing fine, it never feels like fine is enough. It always feels like there is another level I am supposed to reach before I can even sit still.

Rest feels suspicious now. That is the problem. Sitting without doing anything feels like I am committing some mistake that I will have to repay later. My mind literally starts calculating what I am losing while resting. Time. Progress. Output. Like everything in life is being measured on a scale I never agreed to. And I hate that I still follow it like it is real.

Even the smallest parts of my day are not untouched. I eat food while thinking about what I should do after. I finish something and immediately move to the next thing like the first thing did not even deserve to exist. I sit with people but half of my brain is somewhere else running through unfinished lists. It is like I am physically present everywhere but mentally never fully inside anything. That split is exhausting in a way I cannot even explain properly anymore.

There is this constant pressure that I am supposed to be becoming something all the time. Not in some future version of life. Always right now. And if I am not actively improving, I feel like I am falling behind. I don’t even know what I am falling behind, but my brain behaves like it is urgent. Like there is a scoreboard somewhere and I am losing without even seeing the game.

And I kept calling this discipline at one point. I really did. I told myself this is what focused people do. This is what serious people feel like. But that narrative is starting to feel fake now. Because discipline should not feel like constant pressure sitting on your chest. Discipline should not feel like guilt when you rest. Discipline should not feel like your brain refusing to shut up even when everything is technically fine.

It feels more like I trained myself into a system where stopping feels unsafe. Like if I pause too long, I will lose everything I built, even though I cannot clearly define what I built in the first place. It is all just momentum at this point. Movement for the sake of movement. And I hate how easy it is to get used to it.

And somewhere in all this, I also started ignoring myself without even noticing. Tiredness becomes normal. Emotional heaviness becomes something to push through. Confusion becomes something to delay. Everything becomes later. Everything becomes after this task. After this goal. After this phase. But that “after” never actually becomes real. It just keeps moving.

This is where I want to bring in something one of my subs, Chloe, wrote.

---

CHLOE’S ESSAY:

I have always felt like i needed to be filled somehow. like an itch that traces the bones of my spine as I stretch and squirm my arms in absurd directions to reprieve. The spot you cannot reach by yourself.

In my first year of high school the top of my backpack towered well over my head, a walking sack of books and papers that warped the curvature of my lower back. The crave for knowledge i grasped to so deliberately, a search for answers to remedy the shadow of hopelessness that moved just as I.

See, People think intellect is a gift, wrapped in shining foils of validation. Maybe it is. But there’s a reason its common practice to take the price tag off.

Later down the line, it became athleticism, the pursuit of multifaceted excellence that my mother bestowed upon me, just as her mother had on her. Three generations of eldest daughters guide the very pattern of my footsteps, the way I reorganise the dishwasher, take skim milk in my coffee. Since the age of twelve, i have centred high performance above all else. Shifting my life from state to state, one university degree to the next - in search for this illusive idea of success that holds as a north star. But the thing about external motivation is it eventually turns inward, the expectation of others become your inner narrative. Validation becomes disguised as love.

It took four stress fractures; two mental illness diagnoses and osteoporosis at age 23 to finally understand the true havoc my relationship with success had reckoned. My body broke down long before I allowed myself to. Over years of intense physical demand, pain receptors in the brain begin to modulate – a neurological downturn of the bodies’ alarm system. Entering survival mode through repeated exposure to discomfort in search of validation teaches the brain to accept cortisol like a reward. If you’re struggling, you must be doing something right. No pain no gain.

Hustle culture guides this never-ending feedback loop of mind-body disconnect. But when stripped bare, left to sit with without productivity and busyness there’s often nothing and no one left to gain meaning from. When approval becomes your compass, you stop asking where you actually want to go. I used to think I was difficult in relationships, never knowing how to fill a space. I would find myself drifting in and out of conversation, too preoccupied with the to do list playing on a projector in my mind.

Without even realising it I had become a recluse, dismissing genuine connection as a distraction to ambition, forgoing romance and vulnerability as unnecessary energy expenditure.

And when I was stripped of exercise due to recurrent injury, there was nothing to fall back on except for forms of punishment that carry an immense weight of shame and regret. Without control and accomplishment, I was nobody and nowhere. Having a reputation among those you love as ‘good’ and ‘successful’ is more dangerous than it seems, there is much further to fall. And so, I would run in circles, repeating the same mistakes in a circular motion of familiarity and ‘safety’, whatever version of that I had manufactured. Ignorance became crucial to survival.

The brain requires up to 500 calories per day to maintain full neuronal potential. With continuous deficit, the body begins to adapt and prioritise vital systems. The physical trade-offs of this adaptative survival mode are innumerable, but include the downregulation of reproductive hormones, bone formation, aswell as impaired neural connectivity and hippocampal shrinkage. Sitting in the weight of this damage is far from simple, harsh realities become harder to accept when met with the weight of generational expectation.

In small increments, I see shifts. Having the full fat butter on my toast, savouring the last sip of coffee at the windowsill instead of the traffic light, asking the lady at the checkout how her day has been and actually meaning it. Still, I feel the arch of my back extend with hollowness in quiet moments – the intricacy of knowing exactly what’s good for you, yet doing the opposite anyways. But awareness is the first step to change.

I have spent my adulthood trying to fill something that really just wanted to be held.

---

Reading Chloe’s piece honestly irritated me in a strange way because it reflected things I have been avoiding naming properly. The way she talked about performance becoming identity hit harder than I expected. Because it is not something that feels dramatic when you are inside it. It feels normal. It feels like life. Until someone puts it into words and suddenly it feels wrong.

After reading it, I could not continue my day the same way. It kept sitting in my head like a loop. The idea that I might also be turning my entire existence into something I am constantly trying to prove. Even my rest. Even my silence. Even my so-called free time. Everything starts feeling like it needs justification, like I am always being evaluated even when nobody is actually watching.

And the more I sit with it, the more irritated I get at how deep this runs. Because it does not feel like pressure at first. It feels like ambition. It feels like being responsible. It feels like being “on track.” But slowly it becomes something else. It becomes a permanent state of tension that never turns off. A mind that never fully relaxes. A body that is always slightly on edge even when nothing is happening.

Even now I catch myself doing it without noticing. Thinking ahead while something is still happening. Planning the next thing while I am still in the current one. Treating every moment like a stepping stone instead of a place I am actually allowed to stay in. It is like I am constantly leaving my own life before it even finishes happening.

And what really gets to me is how hard it is to break this pattern because it is rewarded everywhere. Being busy looks good. Being tired but productive looks good. Being constantly engaged looks good. So the system keeps feeding itself. And you just keep going because stopping feels like you are breaking some rule nobody explicitly said but everyone silently follows.

We made everything about speed. Fast progress, fast growth, fast success, fast recovery, fast healing, fast everything. Even emotions are supposed to be processed quickly now, like there is a deadline for feeling things properly. And if you are still stuck on something, if you are still tired, if you are still confused, it gets treated like failure instead of just being human. I don’t understand when being human started needing efficiency.

Humans were probably meant to live with space inside their own lives, space where nothing is being earned, nothing is being tracked, nothing is being justified. Space where a moment can just exist without immediately becoming a task or a lesson or a step toward something else. And I don’t think that is laziness or lack of ambition or whatever label gets thrown at it. I think it is just the baseline we forgot while building everything faster and louder and more competitive and more exhausting than it needed to be.

There should be a way to live where your mind is not constantly bracing for the next demand, where your body is not always slightly tense like it is preparing for something, where your rest does not feel like it has to be deserved first. Where you can do things slowly without it feeling like you are falling behind reality. Where you can care about your life without turning it into a performance that never switches off.

Because right now it feels like everything is asking for output, even the parts of life that were supposed to just be lived. And maybe the actual point, the one we keep missing while running through all of this, is not to stop caring or stop working or stop building anything, but to stop treating existence itself like something that has to constantly prove it is worth continuing.

Co-Author Substack ID: Chloe

---

If this piece stayed with you, you can support the work behind Postcards by Hasif by buying me a coffee. It helps me keep this space alive and continue sharing stories like this.