How to Stop Pretending to Be Someone You’re Not (And Why It’s Exhausting You)

You’re sitting in a room full of people.

Someone cracks a joke. You don’t find it funny. You laugh anyway.

Someone asks your opinion. You have one. You say theirs back to them.

Someone asks how you’re doing. You say “I’m good!” with a smile so convincing even you believe it for a second. You can DM me, I’ll be there for you. Not kidding.

You get home. You crash.

And you’re not tired because you did too much. You’re tired because you spent the entire day being someone you’re not. That kind of exhaustion is different. Sleep doesn’t fix it.

We Don’t Pretend Because We’re Liars. We Pretend Because We Were Taught To.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you: Pretending isn’t a character flaw. It’s a survival strategy. And honestly, a pretty logical one.

When we were kids, we ran little experiments all the time. You cried, and someone told you to stop being dramatic. You said the wrong thing at the dinner table, and the room went cold. You showed a part of yourself, a weird interest, a dark thought, a big feeling, and people looked at you like you had two heads.

So you learned. Quietly. Efficiently.

Certain versions of you get love. Certain versions get rejected.

So you buried the versions that didn’t feel safe.

I remember being teased in school and college for being short. Genuinely ridiculous thing to make fun of someone for — you might as well mock them for having elbows. But I didn’t know that then. What it did was make me feel like I needed to earn the right to take up space. Like I had to compensate for existing in this body that apparently didn’t meet the memo.

That stuck with me for years. Way longer than it should have.

And this is the thing — it’s never really just about height, or weight, or how you look, or how much money you make. But we let those things sit right in front of our authenticity, blocking it. We think that once I lose the weight, I’ll be more confident. Once I’m more successful, I’ll feel like I’m enough. As if the real you is waiting behind some better version of your body or bank account.

It’s not.

Your body is just a rollercoaster you got on. You didn’t pick it. You didn’t design it. Some rollercoasters are fancier. Some have scratches. But everyone else has their arms in the air, screaming, having the time of their life, and you’re staring at the scratch the whole ride.

The scratch doesn’t ruin the ride. You do, by obsessing over it.

And the same goes for every external thing we’ve made our worth contingent on. Success. Status. Social approval. These are just frames. Frames that society handed to us, and we accepted them without asking a single question. Why?

Nobody handed me those frames consciously. They didn’t need to. I just watched, absorbed, and started performing accordingly.

And somewhere in that performance, I lost track of who was actually doing the performing.

What the Mask Actually Costs You

We say things like “I just feel off” or “I don’t know, I’m just not happy.” Vague. Shapeless. Easy to ignore.

But let’s be honest about what the mask actually costs.

It costs you anxiety. Because performing requires constant monitoring. You are always scanning the room, Did I say the wrong thing? Do they still like me? You can’t relax. Relaxing means dropping the act. Dropping the act means someone might see the real you. And that feels terrifying.

It costs you loneliness. And this is the part that gets me. You wear the mask to be accepted. But the acceptance you get is for the mask, not for you. People love a version of you that you half-made up. So you sit in rooms full of people who “know” you, and feel completely alone. Because somewhere, you know — if they saw the unedited version, they might not stick around.

It costs you resentment. The quiet kind. The kind you can’t really explain. You say yes when you mean no. You laugh when you want to leave. You keep bending, and bending, and then wonder why you feel slightly contemptuous of everyone around you.

And it costs you yourself. The longer you perform, the more you forget what’s real. You become a character you wrote to survive a situation that no longer exists.

Now here’s something we really don’t talk about enough.

A lot of us are also performing confidence we don’t feel. Performing certainty we don’t have. I did this for years, and I still do it, I won’t lie. But now I catch myself doing it, I’m more aware, and this helps. And here’s what I know from the inside: it’s impossible to sustain. You’ll always have cracks. Someone will always find a way to get under your skin because you’ve given them something to poke at.

The only way is to give up. Show everything. Then there’s nothing left to poke at.

And I know that sounds scary. It is scary. But it’s less exhausting than the alternative.

Try the Opposite of Everything You’ve Been Doing

You’ve been trying to fit in. How’s that going?

If you’re honest with yourself, and I mean actually honest, not the polished version you’d put in a journal, it probably hasn’t worked. You’ve spent years trying to be palatable, trying to be likeable, trying to be the version of yourself that everyone approves of.

And you still feel like shit. Or if you do fit in, you fit in so well that you barely exist.

So here’s my most honest piece of advice, the one I’d give if I had five minutes with you:

Try the opposite of everything you’ve been doing.

Not forever. Just as an experiment. What do you have to lose? Your current strategy clearly isn’t working. It brought you here, to this article, at whatever hour this is.

What “try the opposite” actually means in practice is small. It starts small.

Start by just noticing when you’re performing. Not judging it. Not analysing it. Just notice. Oh, I just said I was fine when I’m not. Interesting. That awareness alone starts to change something.

Then try saying one honest thing a day that you’d normally filter. Something small. Your actual opinion on something. A real answer to “how are you?” — not the polished one. Watch what happens. You might be surprised by how many people lean in instead of pulling away.

And then the harder part. Think about the parts of yourself you’ve ganged up on.

We all do this. Someone laughs at your joke, and it doesn’t land, and instead of defending your humour, you join the prosecution, yeah, that was stupid of me. Someone makes you feel guilty for your sadness, and suddenly, you’re turning on your own sadness too. I shouldn’t be this sensitive. We throw ourselves under the bus constantly to stay in the good graces of people who weren’t thinking about us five minutes later.

The question is: would you do that to someone you loved?

If your best friend was being mocked by everyone in the room, would you join in? Or would you defend them?

Do that for yourself.

Not because you have to agree with every part of yourself. Not because every part of you is perfect. But because abandoning parts of yourself to fit in is the single most expensive thing you’ll ever do. And you’ve been paying that bill for a long time.

So try the opposite.

Find one person, a friend, a therapist, a coach(Ideally me XD), with whom you can be fully yourself. Let that be your practice ground. The place where you rehearse being real before you take it into the rest of your life.

Because authenticity isn’t a switch you flip. It’s a muscle. You build it slowly, with repetition, in safe spaces first, and then in harder ones.

You might also like this article: Why is it so difficult to be happy?

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Question Everything.

— Sarthak Mirchandani