[ SECRET POST #2260 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2260 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 04 pages, 080 secrets from Secret Submission Post #323.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 1 2 - too big ], [ 1 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

... Okay. Speaking as someone who's done this (in the sense of creating a public persona in order to trick myself into being able to survive social/professional encounters) ... There are just a couple of things you should be careful of? Or things can end ... badly.

Don't let the public persona get too far removed from your actual self. The more different you try to act in public, the more unwieldy and hard-to-maintain the act becomes, and the greater the chance of it collapsing at a bad moment (or permanently, which is ... very bad). Just be careful not to go too far, and to take what breaks you can to stop acting for a while. Breathe long enough to go back in.

The second thing is, keep an eye that you're not getting hurt via the act and then denying it. If something hurts you even through the act, acknowledge that. It's better in the long run than pretending nothing affects you when in fact it already has. If at all possible, again take a moment out to, I don't know, sit in a bathroom or something and just acknowledge that that hurt. It ... won't actually make the pain any better, but it lets you keep better track of how much stress you're running under, so you can pull away before the breaking point.

In general, just keep in mind that the public persona is never more than a temporary shield that helps you act in the moment. Always keep track of who you are and what you're feeling underneath it. The persona you put on might be able to go all night, but the person underneath it is probably getting steadily more tired and/or stressed, and you need to take moments out and plan your energy to account for that.

Remember: the persona is only temporary. The act takes energy. No matter how tempting it is, you can't live inside the persona permanently, because it will exhaust you. If you run it too long and too hard, there's a significant risk that it will become unsustainable and collapse (which is where you get randomly breaking down in public while people around you wonder what the fuck just happened).

Just ... be careful, is all. It's a good tool, and it helped me get through a lot of stuff. But if you use it badly, or use it too much, things can end in tears.