What if the self you built was only ever a costume, stitched from routine, recognition, and the need to be seen? And what if, when it all collapsed, what hurt wasn’t the failure but the silence that revealed how much of you was never really yours?
When Performance Becomes Identity and Then Disappears
There was a time in my life when I filmed nearly everything: team meetings, daily sales, workouts with my business partner and our bodybuilder trainer.
We had a rhythm and a reason, so the camera was always nearby and the lifts were documented, the reps calculated not only for progression but for optics, and we trained with intensity and published with consistency.
If the shot wasn’t right, we re-recorded and if the lift didn’t look heavy enough, we tried again.
In those days, I had traded one identity for another: left behind the quiet interiority of academia, that recursive world of poetry and theory, and stepped fully into the charged space of door-to-door solar sales; a world where performance wasn’t metaphor but method, where selfhood was articulated less by contemplation than by energy, repetition, and visibility.
While the shift was dramatic and some may say strange, it never felt forced.
I moved easily, adapting to the language and dress and pace.
I began to speak as they spoke, to train as they trained, and to sell as they sold.
I wasn’t pretending; I believed in the work, I believed in the discipline, and for a time, I believed in the version of myself that emerged inside that momentum but that version of me was never just private.
We all have private selves and public selves, but as I progressed in my career it started to seem like the public self started to rewrite the private.
Through editing and constructing this public self my strength became legible through social media content; my effort towards my body was built through output where every lift started to become both practice as well as social media proof.
Even our struggles in the business, those bad days or hard sales seasons or missed competitions, could be rendered palatable through the right framing; our social media performance wasn’t false but it was certainly performative.
Then, it ended; my business collapsed so the filming stopped and thus the content went silent.
With this collapse, I lost more than structure in my daily life, I lost what can only be called orientation and the gym, once a cathedral of routine, became a place I avoided.
What remained in the wake of that collapse wasn’t just a lack of momentum but a deeper kind of disorientation, the kind that occurs not when you fall behind in a routine, it’s when the identity you built inside that routine no longer feels available to you.
What I’ve come to realize in the quiet, in the absence of the camera and the content, is that the weights I once lifted feel impossibly heavy not because my body has grown weak, but because the self who used to lift them no longer exists.
It’s not just physical regression I’m noticing but the absence of a self who was constantly in motion, always becoming and always visible.
Now, in the aftermath, even the act of returning to the gym feels compromised, not because the weights have changed, but because I have.
The Trap of das Man and the Disappearance of the Self
There’s a concept in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time that has stayed with me since I first read it: das Man, the “they-self.”
It refers to the mode of existence in which one lives not as oneself, but as one; where thought, speech, behavior, and even aspiration are absorbed from the ambient expectations of the culture or the crowd, one lifts as one lifts, one posts as one posts, one succeeds as one is expected to succeed.
The “they” is anonymous but not abstract as it is enacted in a thousand subtle choices that are reinforced by recognition and affirmed by metrics; it offers comfort and in some cases even freedom, the freedom from the anxiety of self-authorship.
You do not have to choose your values because they are chosen for you and all that remains is to perform them convincingly.
That is what I was doing with social media, even if I didn’t know it then.
I wasn’t faking it but I was living inside a system of norms so fluid and totalizing it never once felt coercive because I admired the men I worked with and I loved the camaraderie.
I respected the hustle but slowly over time, my inner world went quiet: I stopped writing, I stopped reading, and I stopped turning inward.
It wasn’t because I rejected that part of me but because it no longer seemed useful in the world I had entered, I mean as everybody knows, poetry doesn’t sell and it cannot scale.
It just didn’t make sense to film a passage from Celan or a thought from Heidegger, so I didn’t.
When the business ended and the team dissolved around me, the script of that life could no longer be followed and I did not know how to return to the old identity.
Perhaps more frighteningly, I did not know how to begin again in the absence of performance on social media.
The Gym as a Mirror: Grief, Not Laziness
The gym, in particular, became unbearable because it had once been the site of such clarity and measurable becoming, such visible progress, and now it only reminded me of what I could no longer access.
I walked in a few times, looked at the weights, felt the silence of a self I was no longer, and left.
I kept thinking it was a sense of laziness that kept me from lifting but I can now see it as a function of grief; what I was resisting wasn’t the effort of working out but the confrontation with the absence of audience and recognition and the curated public self I had once felt I was and had become.
The public self that had been formed around the das man, the “they-self,” of sales culture and entrepreneurship had suddenly vanished.
When Reflection Becomes Resistance to Movement
There’s a danger in long reflection.
What began as an honest inquiry into the resistance I have felt about returning to lifting weights has now become, at times, an elaborate form of avoidance; I have tried to think my way back into lifting weights.
I have tried to understand the collapse so completely that I might somehow repair it through insight alone; I’ve reread some parts of Heidegger, revisited notes from old seminars and outlined essays like this one hoping that clarity might produce some movement, but it hasn’t.
I’ve come to see one of my most persistent defects, one that has traveled with me from academia into sales and now into this liminal space, as the belief that insight precedes action; that if I can understand something completely then I’ll be ready to change, that thinking is a prerequisite to movement, when it simply isn’t.
At least not now.
There is simply nothing left to solve.
The identity I built is gone and the public self who performed strength on camera is gone and whatever new self is trying to form will not emerge through theory, and it will not arrive fully constructed, it will not be summoned through analysis.
It will only take shape through action and motion, through the unremarkable ritual of doing something again without needing to narrate it.
So what remains is not explanation but a choice and action; and the weight, both the literal weight of the barbell and metaphorical weight of a new self, will not grow lighter through reflection and theory, it must be lifted.
If this resonates, dive deeper into The Poetics of Fulfillment, a field guide for those restless for more than fleeting happiness. If you crave depth over dopamine and want fulfillment that endures, this is your next step. Read The Poetics of Fulfillment: Why Chasing Happiness Is Killing Your Fulfillment (And How to Stop)
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Dr. Samuel Gilpin is a poet and essayist who walked away from the academy to write at the edge; where poetry meets philosophy and transformation starts with ruin. At samuelgilpin.com, he explores the deep architecture of change, not with hacks or hype, but with language that sharpens and thought that lingers. He holds a PhD in English literature, but what he offers isn’t academic; it’s personal, raw, and precise. When he’s not writing, he’s reading Eliot for the hundredth time, rewatching The Wire, or lifting weights. Download his free guide, Dangerous by Design, and start reading like your mind depends on it.
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