The Art Of Being

My Reality

I am a performer.

Not the stage kind, though give me a room and I will work it. I mean the kind that wakes up already thinking about the day’s output. The kind that measures love in actions, measures worth in contribution, and somewhere along the line started measuring herself the same way. I am a performer, and for a long time, I was proud of it.

I love to do. I love the movement of it: the planning, the executing, the looking back at a thing and knowing I made that happen. There’s a high in doing that I genuinely don’t think people talk about enough. It feels like flying. It feels like proof. Proof that you exist, that you matter, and that you are not just taking up space on this earth.

I grew up in a world where action carried more weight than words ever could. It wasn’t always stated, but it just was. Being helpful in what you could do was how you earned your place. So I became someone who did everything. And I got good at it — genuinely and beautifully good at it. The rewards came. The recognition eventually came. The feeling of being needed and useful and found came.

But I am also growing up. And growing up has a way of asking you questions that doing can’t answer.

The Layer Underneath

I was watching Zootopia 2 recently and there’s this moment involving Judy Hopps where her hero complex gets named out loud. And something in me went oh. Not because I think I’m out here manipulating people or performing for some calculated agenda. It’s nothing that dramatic. It was a quiet realization.

Sometimes I notice that I’ve been imagining myself as the hero of a situation that hasn’t even happened yet. Walking into a problem and saving it. Being the one people are glad showed up. And when I catch myself mid-fantasy, I have to ask — is this why I love doing so much? Is this part of the motive of the story I get to tell myself about who I am?

I’m not answering yes definitively. I’ve grown enough to know my motives are rarely just one thing. But I think it’s worth asking. Because sometimes the most honest thing you can do is question why you keep reaching for the cape.

My Fear of Being

Here’s what I actually want: balance. Not to throw out the doing — I love it, it has built me, it is genuinely part of who I am. I just want to be able to be too. To sit in a moment without producing something from it. To exist in a room without trying to fix the room.

But when I sit with being — really sit with it — I get nervous.

I think I would be calmer. I also think I would be lazy. I think I would stop doing the hard things because honestly, who wants to do the hard things if they’re not being graded? I’m scared I would lose the edge that makes me, me. That rest would tip into stagnation and I wouldn’t even notice.

And I know that’s not what being actually is. I know it’s not a binary. You can be and still have standards, be and still show up, be and not dissolve. But my whole system has been trained to read stillness as laziness, to see “just existing” as not enough.

Doing has its downside, which is exactly why I’m writing this. But I grind like my life depends on it because for a long time, I believed it did. I care because caring looks like work, and if you’re not showing the work, what are you even doing? Love is an action word — that’s been my whole philosophy. Give me the effort. Show me it’s real.

But love is also being, isn’t it? Just showing up without the performance. Someone loving you not for what you bring to the room but simply because you’re in it. I want that. Deeply. And yet somewhere I feel like I have to earn the right to receive it. Like I have to do before I can be. Like I have to pay a wage just to deserve a salary.

Which, when I write it out like that, sounds a little like slavery.

Origin Story

I think what happened is I learned very early that asking for permission was just how things worked. You checked before you moved. You confirmed before you acted. You didn’t just be — you proved your way into belonging.

And that was fine when I was a kid. It was even right. But at some point that pattern kept going past its expiry date, and now I’m an adult who still sometimes waits for permission to take up space. Who still occasionally ties her value to what she can deliver.

I want to break that cycle. I want the audacity to just be — to be whoever I am on a given day, to not perform it, or justify it. And the faith side of me knows this is actually what God has been saying all along. He loved me before I did a single impressive thing. Before the achievements, before the action words, before I became someone useful. His love is not a response to my performance, it is the starting condition.

God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble. I sit with that. Because the version of me that imagines herself saving the day, that ties her worth to her output, that has to earn rest — that’s a kind of pride. Quiet pride. A kind of pride dressed up as diligence. And I want to lay it down. Not all at once, just slowly, honestly, lay it down.

What Being Could Actually Look Like

I’m trying to reimagine it. Not being as giving up. Being as something truer.

Being might mean going a whole day without producing something and not punishing myself for it. Being might mean letting someone love me without handing them a list of reasons why they should.

Being might also mean the recipe is custom. It’s not a formula I can execute perfectly on the first try. And that, for someone who has always preferred a plan, is maybe the most uncomfortable part.

But the balance — which is what I actually want — starts with honesty. With asking the uncomfortable questions about motive. Doing from a different place over time: from rest rather than fear, from love rather than performance, and from identity rather than achievement.

The Part I Don’t Have Yet

I don’t have an ending for this because I’m still inside it.

Some days I wake up and my brain is already doing, before my body has even caught up. Some days stillness still reads as failure. And I’m still a little afraid that if I slow down enough to just be, I’ll find there wasn’t as much there as the doing made it seem.

But I’m writing this. And writing it honestly. Which means I’m at least standing at the door of being, even if I haven’t fully walked through it.

Can I choose to be? Every day, just be?

I want to find out. So help me God.