There is a moment in The Villa where one woman watches her famous friend get asked for a photo, and she can see the exact second it happens. The friend flips. One breath she is herself, having a glass of wine on vacation with her best friend, and the next she is the public version, the persona, the figure people line up to meet. They are two different people, and only someone who knows her well can see the switch throw.
I felt that scene in my chest, because I have a switch like that, and the people who love me can see it every time.
The voice I built on purpose
There is a running joke in my house. My husband and kids say I have a work voice. They can hear it land the second I answer a work call or join a work Zoom, this brighter, smoother, warmer version of me that they find frankly hilarious because it sounds so fake to them. And honestly, it probably is fake. It is a persona I built a long time ago, back when I decided who I needed to be in public in order to grow my business. I picked her, and I have kept her forward facing in that business ever since. If I talked to a sales lead the way I talk to my own kids on the days they are testing every last nerve I have, I would never close a thing.
For years I ran that persona at full power on the road. I would be wrung out, physically and mentally, from the travel and the selling and from being a mom and a wife on top of all of it, and none of it mattered. The second I walked into the building or stepped behind my booth, I turned her on whether I had it in me or not. Full smile. Bright and peppy. Always positive, always on, always reaching out first.
The days were long in a way that is hard to explain to anyone who has not done it. Breakfast in the hotel lobby at seven, where customers are already milling around and you are already on, already chatting them up before you have finished your coffee. The convention floor by eight and there until six. Then dinner and drinks with a group of customers you did not choose, where the whole game becomes praying you land a seat next to someone who will not drain the last of the social battery you have left, and they almost always do. If my head hit the pillow by eleven I was lucky, and then I got up and did it again for two or three more days before rushing home, where there was no recovery and no recharging, because home meant going straight back into mom mode and then doing the entire thing over again the next week.
I want to be clear about something, because it is the real point. The persona was never the problem. She is good at her job. The problem is that she was never actually me.
I am not bubbly. I am not extroverted. I am not naturally upbeat or chatty or on. I am someone who grinds, who wants to grow the thing, who likes making money as much as the next person. But the public face of all of that was a costume, and the older I got, the heavier the costume got to wear.
For most of those years I traveled with one of my staff, the same woman more often than not, brought along for the extra hands when the sales inquiries and the customer load got heavy. We got close. Close enough that we could each clock the exact moment the other one switched from her real self to her work self, the smile going up, the charm clicking into place, exactly like the two friends in the book. The difference between us is that she is still out there doing it, still turning it on, and she genuinely loves it. There is no burnout coming for her, knock on wood, because it is not a costume for her. It is just who she gets to be. Watching her is how I finally understood that the persona was never the villain. It just was never mine.
The night the switch stopped working
I should tell you about the night the switch stopped working.
It was one of the last conventions I traveled to. End of a long event, day two or three, when the social tank is already running on fumes. I got wrangled into a dinner with about twenty customers and prospects, and I drew the worst possible seat, dead center of the table. If you have never sat there, it is its own kind of trap. Nobody talks to you directly, but you are surrounded on every side, so you have to stay on, constantly, tracking five conversations at once, which is brutal when there is nothing left in you.
And I got this feeling in my chest that I needed to leave. Not wanted. Needed. I could not do it for one more minute. I could not smile through ‘Jim’ telling the same story I had already heard him tell three other times that same weekend, even though the people he was telling it to now were hearing it fresh. I faked a call from one of my kids and stepped outside for air. I gave myself the whole pep talk. Ten years of this, I am a pro, I can walk back in there and finish strong. So I did. I walked back through all of them, sat down, and lasted about two minutes before I faked a second call from home, got up, drove out of the parking lot to my hotel, and went to bed feeling completely numb.
Nobody thought a thing of it. I had blamed kid stuff, and I am a woman, so kid stuff is a get-out-of-jail-free card nobody questions. The next day, one or two people asked if everything was okay, if they had seen me slip out. Everyone else carried on as if I had never been there at all.
And that was the lightbulb. Not a triumphant one. A quiet, almost lonely one, sitting in my car in a dark parking lot. I didn’t have to be there. I could keep the business running and growing from behind the scenes, and I could start spending some of that energy on being me instead of performing her.
Where else was I doing this?
Here is the part I didn’t see coming. The permission I gave myself in that parking lot didn’t stay parked at work. Once I watched the whole event carry on without me, once I saw that the building didn’t fall down just because I went to bed, I started asking where else I was throwing that switch for no reason. The answer was basically everywhere.
So these days the switch gets harder to flip at all, and I have mostly stopped trying for anything that isn’t work. The extended family gathering that leaves me hollow for the rest of the day. The friend of a friend who wants to start a thing. The same-school, same-team mom angling for a deep, soul-baring talk when we don’t actually know each other. I used to fake my way through all of it because that is what you do, and now I mostly don’t, or I show up as myself and leave when I’m done.
If that makes people read me as cold, or decide I have a resting bitch face, or call me difficult, then we were probably never going to be close anyway.
The book never tells us how the woman doing the switching really feels about it. We watch her flip from herself to the public version and back, but the story closes the door before we learn whether it ever costs her anything. Maybe she is like my old coworker and it never will. Or maybe she is the version of me who never got stuck in the wrong seat at the wrong dinner, still turning it on, still assuming that is just the price of the life she built.
Take me as I am. The real one. The one who left the dinner.
The scene that started this is in The Villa by Rachel Hawkins. If you want it, my Bookshop.org link supports indie bookstores and tosses a few cents my way.
Do you have a work voice? Hit the comment button and tell me what yours sounds like, and whether the people who love you can hear it the second it switches on.
The line, "The persona was never the problem. She is good at her job. The problem is that she was never actually me," really stayed with me. I think so many people will see themselves in that. Thank you for such an honest piece.