The Art of Not Performing: Dropping the Mask

When I finally stopped performing when I stopped trying to please, prove, perfect—what came wasn’t ease. It was boredom. Thick, strange, uncomfortable boredom.

And at first, it felt like failure.

For years, I had been on autopilot. Smiling when I didn’t want to. Reading every room and adjusting myself to keep the peace. Wearing the polish on my face, my voice, my life. I had performed my way into survival, into success, into burnout. And I didn’t even know I was doing it.

But perimenopause had other plans.

When my estrogen started to shift, my system changed. My tolerance changed. My ability to accommodate everyone else’s nervous system? Gone. My capacity to be endlessly available, endlessly digestible, endlessly pleasing? Shattered. The habits that used to earn me praise began to feel like poison. Even my body started rejecting what didn’t match. What used to feel “fine” now felt intolerable. That wasn’t failure. That was resonance realigning.

And yet without the buzz of over-functioning, I felt empty.

The boredom moved in quickly. I reached for all my favorite distractions my phone, my shows, my projects, even erotic fantasy. I turned the music up loud. I opened and closed the fridge three times in five minutes. Because the silence felt unbearable. The boredom felt like death.

But here’s what I know now:
Boredom isn’t death. It’s the nervous system coming out of performance mode. It’s the void between who you were and who you’re becoming.

And if you can stay with it if you can not fix it you’ll start to feel something else rise.

For me, it started in the body. A slow heat. Sometimes it showed up as a hot flash. Other times it was a deep pulse of restlessness, anger, and urgency. I used to think something was wrong with me. That I was too sensitive, too moody, too reactive. But that rising heat? It wasn’t just hormones. It was decades of suppressed rage waking up.

It was my body saying: no more.

No more systems that diminish. No more relationships that silence. No more pretending to be okay with what has always felt wrong. That heat was my body refusing to stay in alignment with anything that didn’t match who I had become. It was a sacred fire not to burn me down, but to burn off the mask.

And beneath the boredom, beneath the fire, came presence.

That’s when I started to feel again. Not perform; feel.
I started hearing the birds. Feeling the texture of the chair beneath me. Letting silence stretch longer than it used to. I didn’t need a goal or an outcome or a timeline. I started painting again, not for sale, just because it calmed my breath. I wandered into nature and I let myself be held by the trees and the sky and the stillness that once scared me.

And in that stillness, I remembered myself.

We talk about burnout, about hot flashes, about midlife chaos like they’re something to fix. But what if they’re something to follow?

What if boredom is the first sign that your nervous system is finally free enough to stop performing?

What if the heat rising isn’t a problem—but a signal?

What if perimenopause is your body becoming honest?

What if the lull is sacred?

We’re not here to keep showing up perfect. We’re here to show up true. True to the moment, true to ourselves, we no longer self abandon, we reclaim the fire.