My dad had a way of cutting through noise with a single sentence.
When someone would go on and on, making grand declarations, performing certainty, he would wait for the right moment and say, with amusement: “Are you telling me, or asking me?”
He wasn’t being cruel.
He was actually being accurate, I learned later on.
Because there is a difference between a person who has arrived at something and a person still trying to convince themselves they have.
The volume is what gives it away.
But, first, let’s talk about the trigger..
We can call it,
THE RECONSTRUCTION
Something breaks.
A marriage ends.
A body deteriorates.
A business collapses.
A faith cracks.
But that thing that broke wasn’t just an event.
It was an identity.
And the human psyche, faced with the rubble of who it thought it was, does what it always does: it rebuilds.
Now, that reconstruction isn’t dishonest.
Usually never.
That needs to be said clearly.
The divorced man who becomes a devoted husband, the overweight man who becomes the fit father, the burnt-out executive who becomes the minimalist, the addict who becomes the sobriety advocate, these are real people doing real work.
The effort is genuine.
The change is often substantial.
But there is a version of that reconstruction that quietly outsources something critical to an audience…
The likes.
The amens.
The ‘you’re such an inspiration.’
The comments that say you’ve changed.
But these aren’t just vanity…
Rather, in a specific psychological pattern, they serve as load-bearing elements.
Remove them, and the internal structure wobbles.
And that is not healing.
That is outsourced self-worth.
The broadcast isn’t the healing. Sometimes it’s the avoidance of it.
Now,
I KNOW THIS BECAUSE I DID IT
I gained weight.
Gradually and not glamorously.
I had a wake-up encounter one day and realised, clearly, that I had become fat, and that I had been pretending otherwise.
So I did the work.
Immediately.
I lost 60 pounds.
I got fit.
I built a version of myself I was proud of.
And then I did something that, in retrospect, tells the full story: I created an online persona called ‘Healthy Dad.’
And,
I started posting the meals.
I posted the workouts.
I posted the before-and-after.
I framed it as accountability, as inspiration, as community.
And some of that was true.
But underneath it, something else was operating.
The persona was doing work my internal world hadn’t finished yet.
I hadn’t fully faced why I had let myself go in the first place.
I hadn’t sat with the shame, the disconnection from my own body, the quiet self-neglect that preceded the weight gain.
I had skipped straight from the wound to the trophy, and I was inviting the internet to confirm I had arrived.
And in reality, my audience was carrying something for me without knowing it.
Every interaction was a small proof that I was now a different person.
The problem is that proof sourced from outside never quite settles the question inside.
Now,
THE PATTERN HAS MANY FACES
And once you see the architecture or structure, you recognise it everywhere.
Not to judge, but to understand…
The born-again faithful husband, broadcasting his devotion after a marriage ended, who fills his social media with anniversary posts and declarations of love that feel slightly too loud, slightly too frequent.
He may genuinely love his wife.
But the volume is doing work.
The radical minimalist who lost everything financially and now posts about owning 47 possessions, who turns scarcity into a brand, who performs simplicity with the same intensity as others perform wealth.
The ideology is real.
But so is the reconstruction.
The sober influencer whose entire identity has collapsed into sobriety, who cannot post about Tuesday without referencing recovery, whose whole online presence is a monument to not drinking.
The sobriety is earned and real.
But when the identity becomes the sobriety rather than the person, the work is still in progress.
The hustle culture dropout who spent a decade grinding and burning out, and now runs a slow-living brand with the same relentless, optimised intensity they brought to the hustle.
Different content, same compulsion.
The common thread isn’t the content.
It’s the compulsion.
It’s the fact that the internal sense of self is still dependent on the external signal.
It’s the fact that stopping the broadcast would feel like losing the ground under their feet.
Here’s something I’ve learned and observed…
You know you’ve truly integrated something when you can be quiet about it.
You don’t need to share.
You don’t need the validation.
You just ‘are’ now…
So, why do we do this, aim for external signals rather than internal knowing?
THE PSYCHOLOGY UNDERNEATH
Terror Management Theory, developed by Jeff Greenberg and colleagues, suggests that when our sense of identity is threatened, we engage in symbolic self-defence.
In other words,
We don’t just change; we overclaim in the direction of change to buffer against the fear of reverting.
Compensatory conviction works similarly.
When we perceive a deficit in one area of our identity, we overclaim in the opposite direction to compensate.
For instance, the man who failed at faithfulness doesn’t just become faithful…
He becomes the most publicly faithful man on your feed.
Erving Goffman also described social life as performance, the self as something we present and manage in front of audiences.
However, what he understood is that the performance and the performer are never fully identical.
There is always a gap.
So, the question becomes whether you are performing to connect or performing to convince.
Because when the performance is about convincing, the audience is no longer your community.
They are essentially your coping mechanism.
THE DISTINCTION THAT MATTERS
Now, none of that means sharing your journey is wrong.
None of this means public vulnerability is performance.
Because the line isn’t the sharing.
The line is the dependency.
That’s the real test…
It is about needing the audience’s input.
The validation.
The external signals that you are doing well.
That you are a good person.
A good husband.
A good dad.
A beautiful wife.
Skinny.
Ripped.
In shape…
Ask yourself honestly:
Could you stop posting about something for three months and still feel stable on your journey?
or,
When someone challenges your new identity and life, do you feel curiosity, amusement, or a sense of threat?
Are you sharing because it adds something to others, or because the response adds something to you?
Is the story you tell publicly the same story you tell yourself at 2 am?
Here’s what I’ve observed…
Integration is quiet.
Not silent, but quiet.
The person who has genuinely done the work can speak about it without urgency.
They can hold it without performing it.
They can be questioned about it without their architecture collapsing.
The thing that changed has become part of them, not the whole of them.
The person still mid-reconstruction needs the audience to hold the thing together.
And that’s not a character flaw.
It’s a signal or sign.
It’s the psyche asking for something that only internal work can actually provide.
True healing doesn’t need an audience. It needs honesty. The audience is the substitute.
WHAT OTHERS HAVE TO CARRY
Now, here is the part that doesn’t get said enough in my opinion…
When your healing is performed publicly and the performance is load-bearing, you are asking your audience to carry something on your behalf.
You are asking them to consistently affirm, consistently validate, and consistently reflect back the identity you are trying to lock in.
And that is a weight.
It’s not visible.
And your followers don’t know they’re carrying it.
But when the affirmation slows, when the comments taper, when the algorithm shifts, and the reach drops, the person whose recovery is audience-dependent doesn’t just feel irrelevant.
They feel destabilised.
And that destabilisation is the proof that the work was never finished.
Listen, nobody owes you their emotional labour in service of your unresolved pain.
Not your partner, who gets to be a prop in your redemption narrative.
Not your children, who get photographed as evidence of your transformation.
Not your followers, who signed up for inspiration and are quietly funding a reconstruction they know nothing about.
Do the work so that others don’t have to carry it for you.
Here’s
WHAT INTEGRATION ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE
The people who have genuinely done the work are harder to find online.
Not because they’ve disappeared, but because they are less urgent.
They post about their growth without needing you to confirm it.
They can acknowledge the failure that preceded the change without flinching or over-explaining.
They don’t build their whole identity on the new version of themselves, because they understand that identity is not a destination.
And even if it was, trust me, the destination WILL change again.
Just give it time.
Also,
They can be questioned.
They can be wrong.
They can have a bad week without it meaning the whole thing was a lie.
They are not performing for you.
They are simply living in the direction they chose, and occasionally sharing it because connection is human, not because validation is oxygen.
THAT is the difference.
So, why is this rant relevant at all?
HERE’S WHY
My dad’s question cuts both ways.
Sometimes you’re telling.
Sometimes you’re asking.
But the healthiest version of both is knowing which one is true.
The reconstructions we go through after failure or shame are necessary and human.
But at some point, the scaffolding is supposed to come down.
The building is supposed to stand on its own.
When it can’t, when it still needs the audience to hold it up, that is not a strength publicly performed.
That is a sign that the real conversation hasn’t happened yet.
So, instead,
Have it privately.
With yourself.
With someone you trust.
With a professional, if the wound goes deep enough.
Do it NOT because the public version is shameful, but because you deserve something the audience can never actually give you: peace that holds and lasts when no one is watching.
