The mirror in my Singapore bathroom has a crack running through it—a lightning bolt fracture from when the previous tenant slammed the medicine cabinet too hard. At 3 AM on a Tuesday in March, I stood staring at my reflection split by that jagged line, watching myself fragment into pieces. I’d been awake for thirty-six hours, riding the kind of entrepreneurial high that passes for success in this city of eternal ambition. My latest project had just hit another milestone. My content was viral. My apartment overlooked Robertson Quay—the renovated warehouses turned wine bars, the river taxis gliding past, expats jogging by at precisely 6 AM—the kind of view that’s supposed to mean you’ve made it.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been alone without performing for someone.
Even there, in my own bathroom at 3 AM, I was curating the moment. Some part of my brain was already crafting the LinkedIn post—or worse, imagining how this moment would play as an X thread, complete with strategic line breaks for maximum engagement. I watched myself watching myself, an infinite regression of observation and performance. My hands gripped the sink. The porcelain was cold. Real. The only real thing in a life that had become a hall of mirrors.
That’s when it happened—the thing I’d been running from since I’d left my corporate job years earlier, since I’d rebranded myself as an entrepreneur and thought leader and all the other costumes we wear in the great theater of modern achievement. The mask didn’t slip. It shattered.
I couldn’t recognize the person in the mirror because there was no person there. Just a collection of achievements, strategies, and carefully calibrated responses. A high-functioning hologram where a human used to be.
The breakdown had been building for months, hidden beneath a crescendo of external success. From the outside, I was living the Singapore dream—the entrepreneur who’d escaped corporate drudgery, built multiple businesses, traveled the region, accumulated the right metrics. Thirty percent of entrepreneurs experience depression, compared to seven percent of the general population. I’d beaten those odds for years through sheer performance.
My days were masterclasses in optimization—the kind celebrated in every Notion template and Substack productivity guide, tracked through apps that promised to ‘unlock my potential’ while locking me into ever-tighter performance loops. Morning meditation (tracked). Productivity sprints (measured). Strategic networking (logged). Even my downtime was productive—reading business books by the pool, treating relaxation as another KPI to hit. I’d turned myself into a perfectly calibrated achievement machine, forgetting that machines don’t have souls.
The cracks started small. A moment of blankness during a podcast interview when asked about my passions. The hollow feeling after closing a major deal. The increasing need for caffeine, then stronger stimulants, then whatever else could keep the performance going. I told myself these were just the costs of success, the price of playing at this level.
But bodies keep score in ways our minds refuse to acknowledge. The insomnia started first—not the romantic kind where tortured geniuses have brilliant insights, but the gray, grinding inability to stop performing even for sleep. I’d catch myself adjusting my posture while alone, maintaining the confident stance I’d learned from a body language course.
The night of the mirror, I’d been up finishing a presentation deck. Not because it was due—it wasn’t. But because producing was the only way I knew how to exist. When I stopped producing, stopped performing, stopped achieving, what was left? The question terrified me so much I’d structured my entire life to avoid asking it.
It’s not just the stress or the uncertainty. It’s the complete fusion of self with performance, until you can no longer locate where the business plan ends and the human begins.
When the performance finally stops, the silence is deafening.
I called in sick to my own company the next day—a first in three years. The phrase itself felt absurd. How do you call in sick to yourself? But I couldn’t face another day of playing CEO, couldn’t summon the energy for one more strategic conversation or growth hack or disruption narrative.
Instead, I sat on my couch and watched the city below continue its relentless metabolism. Singapore never stops performing—cranes swinging, deals closing, futures optimizing. I’d chosen this city partly for that energy, the way it validated my own perpetual motion. Now it felt like watching a massive theater production I’d forgotten how to leave.
I’d internalized some sort of LinkedIn dysmorphia—a distortion stemming from the comparison of my inner reality to others’ performed success. Three-quarters of adults experience imposter syndrome, that gnawing sense that we’re frauds about to be discovered. But what happens when you realize the impostor is the only version of you that exists? That the “real” you everyone might discover is just… nothing?
I started cataloging what was actually mine versus what I’d borrowed or performed. The exercise was brutal—my morning routine copied from a productivity guru, my leadership style amalgamated from TED talks, even my vulnerabilities curated as strategic admissions that reinforced my strength.
One by one, I tried stripping away the performances. No social media for a day, then a week. No productivity tracking. No strategic networking. No optimizing conversations for future value. The withdrawal was physical—my hands literally shook from not checking metrics, from not producing content, from not performing productivity.
At a hawker center one afternoon, I attempted to simply exist without purpose. The uncle at the char kway teow stall glanced at me occasionally, probably wondering why this ang moh was lingering so long. Without an agenda, without optimization, the anxiety of purposelessness was almost unbearable.
What remained when I stopped performing was terrifying: nothing. Or rather, something so quiet and unformed that it might as well have been nothing. A presence without achievements. A being without metrics. I’d spent so many years building my identity from external validation that when I removed the external, the identity went with it.
Most relationships revealed themselves as purely transactional—we performed success for each other, validated achievements, enabled illusions. When I stopped showing up as my performed self, these connections simply evaporated, like removing an actor from a scene. But a few people remained—an old friend who’d seen through my performance years ago, my brother who noticed something wrong not from what I said but from what I stopped saying. These people had somehow looked past the performance all along.
Philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes about the “achievement-subject” who becomes their own exploiter, driving themselves harder than any external boss ever could. In the darkness of my Singapore apartment, I finally understood what he meant. I wasn’t burned out from working for someone else. I was burned out from the relentless performance of being myself—or rather, the version of myself I’d created for public consumption.
Goffman’s theory of life as theater had always seemed clever, an interesting metaphor. Now it felt like a diagnosis. I’d been living entirely in what he calls the “front stage,” performing so constantly that I’d forgotten the backstage existed.
The darkness—that space where performance becomes impossible—is terrifying precisely because it’s so honest. Without the energy to maintain our masks, we face what Jung called the dissolution of the persona. The carefully constructed social face cracks, and what emerges isn’t pretty. It’s raw, unformed, often infantile. It’s the self before it learned to perform, and meeting it feels like encountering an alien.
I spent days in my apartment doing nothing—and I mean nothing in the most literal sense. Not meditating (that would be productive). Not reflecting (that would be strategic). Just existing in the strange space between sleep and waking, performance and being. Time became elastic. I’d lose hours staring at the wall, not thinking, just being present with the absence of everything I’d built.
There’s a bottom below the bottom—the moment when you realize that even your suffering has been a performance, that even your breakdown is being curated for eventual redemption. What I found in that darkness wasn’t enlightenment or revelation. It was simpler and stranger: the experience of existing without narrating my existence. For the first time in years, maybe decades, I wasn’t watching myself live. I was just living. It was terrifying. It was boring. It was the most honest I’d been since childhood.
The revelation, when it came, wasn’t dramatic. No lightning bolts or spiritual awakenings. Just a quiet recognition one morning as I made coffee without Instagramming it, ate breakfast without optimizing my macros, sat by the window without turning the moment into content.
I realized that what I’d called “myself” was actually a corporation. Justin Brown, Inc.—a performance entity designed to maximize certain metrics, optimize certain outcomes, produce certain results. I’d become ‘a walking personal brand,’ mistaking my market value for my human worth. The burnout wasn’t personal; it was structural.
Winnicott wrote about ‘false self’ that develops to protect us from trauma. But in our performance economy, the false self isn’t protection—it’s the product. We’re not hiding our true selves; we’re forgetting they exist, until Jung’s persona becomes indistinguishable from the self.
My earlier encounter with Rudá Iandê had planted seeds I was only now understanding. He’d told me I was living someone else’s life without realizing it. At the time, I’d thought he meant I was following other people’s advice. Now I understood it was deeper—I was living as a character in my own story rather than as the author.
The difference between who we are and who we perform isn’t just philosophical—it’s visceral. The performed self has clean edges, clear narratives, definable goals. The actual self is messier, full of contradictions, comfortable with not knowing. The performed self speaks in LinkedIn posts and TED talk soundbites. The actual self sometimes has nothing to say.
What becomes clear in the ruins of a performed life is how much energy we spend maintaining the performance. Every interaction filtered through the lens of “how does this reflect on my brand?” Every experience evaluated for its content potential. It’s exhausting because it’s supposed to be exhausting—the performance requires all our energy so we never have enough left to question why we’re performing.
I’m writing this six months later, still in Singapore, still running my businesses, still creating content. From the outside, perhaps little has changed. The difference is invisible but profound: I’m no longer performing my life. I’m living it.
This isn’t a success story. There’s no triumphant return, no phoenix from the ashes, no ten-step program to sell you. Some things need to stay broken to let the light in. The crack in my bathroom mirror is still there—I’ve had months to fix it but haven’t. It reminds me that wholeness isn’t about perfection. It’s about integration.
Living with this knowledge in a world that rewards performance is like being awake in a city of sleepwalkers. The pressure to return to performance is constant. Every algorithm rewards the performed self. Every networking event expects the polished version. Every success metric measures the mask, not the human.
But something has shifted in how I navigate this theater. I still play roles—we all do—but I no longer confuse them with myself. When I put on the CEO mask for a meeting, I know it’s a mask. When I craft content, I’m aware of the crafting. The difference between conscious performance and unconscious fusion is the difference between wearing clothes and thinking you are your clothes.
The ongoing practice isn’t about never performing—that’s impossible in our world. It’s about remembering that you’re performing, maintaining what I’ve learned to call fluid integrity—the ability to move between roles without losing your center, to perform without becoming the performance.
The darkest moment—standing before that cracked mirror, seeing nothing but performance—wasn’t the ending of my story. It was the moment I finally stopped narrating and started living. The moment the lights came up in the theater and I saw the empty seats, the painted backdrop, the costume I’d mistaken for skin.
The crack in my mirror splits my reflection every morning. I could see it as broken. Instead, I see it as honest—a daily reminder that wholeness isn’t about seamless presentation. It’s about accepting the fractures, integrating the fragments, and showing up anyway—not as the person I’ve performed, but as the one I am.
In a world that profits from our performance, choosing to be real is a radical act. Not the performed authenticity that’s become another optimization strategy, but the messy, uncertain, unproductive reality of being human. It’s harder than performing. It’s less rewarded. It’s the only way I’ve found to actually live.
The show goes on, but now I know it’s a show. And in that knowing, in that space between performer and person, there’s finally room to breathe.
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