After thirteen years of publishing Soul Sustenance here on WordPress, my writing now lives on Substack as part of my broader platform, The Vital Life; I’d love it if you would subscribe there to keep receiving new posts and explore the rest of my essays.
In a recent coaching session, I admitted something that surprised even me.
My coach asked a question I thought I knew the answer to, something about where in my life I feel most free to be myself. I opened my mouth expecting the usual shortlist to tumble out: with my closest friends and family, in my journal, on a walk with music in my ears. But what came out instead was silence. And then, slowly, the truth: I couldn’t think of a single time, situation, or relationship in my forty years of life where I have ever felt fully expressed, without a curation of some sort.
I sat with that for what felt like a long time. Then I cried.
I learned to perform early. By four years old, I was already on stage, dancing, learning to read the room and move in whatever way earned applause. And while I loved dance for the art of it, something else was being wired alongside the pirouettes: an unconscious belief that the version of me most likely to be accepted, respected, or loved was the one I carefully assembled for the audience in front of me. I became a chameleon. In any setting, I could quickly read the room and mold myself into whatever shape felt safest. That skill gave me a lot over the years: excellent grades, a respected career in global HR where navigating cultures and languages and unspoken rules made me very good at my job, and a reputation for being polished and prepared.
It also gave me an exhausting, relentless drive to be perfect…to say the right thing, to never be caught off guard, and to make it look effortless while believing the fact that it was actually hard was the sign of my value.
To some degree, we all do this. We are tribal beings, and there was a time when true individuality carried a real existential threat. But for most people in our modern era, curated social media profiles aside, there is a space where you let your proverbial hair down. You say the thing that’s really on your heart. You stop caring what you look like, and you simply are.
For me, I can’t recall ever doing that. There have been glimpses, moments where I color outside the lines or swerve outside the lane. But I snap back quickly, lest I expose myself to rejection or judgment in some way. And this isn’t a dig on the people in my life. They haven’t asked me to perform. I simply don’t know any other way to be.
That realization moved me to tears of a particular kind: profound sadness mixed with something like recognition. Because isn’t that the whole point of all of this? The coaching, the retreats, the inner work? I have been fascinated by the process of knowing myself and my place in this vast universe for as long as I can remember, and yet here I was, humbly realizing that the one thing I guide others toward, the full, sovereign expression of who they are, is the very thing I have been quietly withholding from myself.
There’s a phrase I’ve heard throughout the years: “Life is not a dress rehearsal.” It’s often attributed to Rose Tremain, though it’s been popularized by many. I’ve always appreciated the sentiment: that we should live more in the present, savoring this one shot at existence rather than perpetually preparing for an unknown and largely uncontrollable future.
But now the phrase has taken on a different meaning for me.
Because a dress rehearsal, for all its imperfections, at least implies that mistakes are allowed. The performance hasn’t started yet, so there’s room to stumble.
I haven’t been living like I’m in a dress rehearsal. I’ve been living like I’m in a performance, where every room becomes a stage and every interaction a scene to get right, every version of me carefully calibrated for maximum approval.
What I want is the thing that lives between the two, where you’re present enough to feel it all and free enough to let it be imperfect. I can look at that little girl who unconsciously adopted this strategy and recognize she was doing the best she could with what she had. And I can also wonder, with a gentleness I’m still learning, how I begin to unlearn something so deeply wired into my body and my way of being.
After thirteen years of writing publicly, this is likely the most vulnerable and terrifying admission I’ve ever made out loud. It’s so old and so familiar that naming it feels like pulling a thread I’m not sure I know how to restitch. I don’t know where this leads or who exactly the Nathalie is beneath the performance. And that is terrifying. But I think the admission itself might be the first real act of not performing. Just a woman sitting with the quiet, unassuming truth that she has spent most of her life on a stage she built herself, and she is only now beginning to wonder what it would feel like to step off.
Maybe that’s where it starts.
With the willingness to be seen in the not-knowing. To let the dress rehearsal, where mistakes are allowed, become the real thing, in real time, on full display.
We go to performances to marvel at people’s exceptional capacity, but we connect as humans when we feel something real.
And this, flawed and uncertain as it is, is real.
soulsustenance 