You’ve Been Playing a Role. It’s Time to Come Home. transcript

You don't hate yourself? Not really. You just don't know yourself because you spent most of your life building a persona that helped you stay alive, well, and safe, whatever that means to you, because it means different things for everybody. And that self. You've built, the performed self. It's the only YOU you know right now, but you're struggling with that identity. You feel suffocated and trapped in your skin. You live with the ache and grief of not being known, and you're not looking for answers to these questions.

Who am I without the mask? Who am I when I'm not performing? How do I stop betraying myself just to belong? How do I love someone I've never truly met? This video is not here to coddle you. It's here to walk you home to the truth, to the rawness, to the love that will close the gap between who you are and who you've been pretending to be. By the end of this, you won't be looking for another video to 'fix' you. You'll remember that you were never broken or missing.

You were just buried. Listen to me when I say this you cannot heal what you refuse to identify. If you want to unmask yourself, you have to be willing to tell the truth about why you started hiding in the first place. You didn't wake up one day and decide to abandon yourself. You were forced to by circumstances beyond your control. Maybe you had neglectful, abusive, unavailable or unreachable parents or caregivers. Maybe your culture taught you that obedience was your identity.

Maybe there was so much instability, loss, bullying, and lack around you that there was no space for your needs, no space for your authenticity. So you became whatever was needed, whatever was rewarded, whatever was understood to survive. And every time you traded your existence for approval, your nervous system whispered, this is how we survive. So you mastered shape shifting, wearing numerous identities to keep yourself from falling apart.

Now after you identify and name your why, I'm going to ask you to do something I don't hear people talk about often. I want you to actively, purposefully rage, grieve, mourn, and scream about it. Be intentional about your anger, about your pain, about the fact that at your most vulnerable, most innocent state, the only time the world should have been all roses and rainbows, you were failed, unprotected, left to fend for yourself.

This isn't about blame. This isn't about hating people. This is about you for the first time in your life, instead of walking around with no awareness of how you embody your pain, instead of bleeding on everything and everyone, unaware of what you carry, unaware of where it hurts you make space in your life to mourn what could have been, who could have been. To mourn the years lost, trying to feel human because someone or something without your permission shrouded you.

This process will look different for everyone. But to aid you in this, I will tell you something that might crack you open. Anger is not good or bad. It can be sacred. It's just an emotion. Just like people across different cultures take the time to mourn the death of loved ones. Do something no one ever did for you. Mourn the child you used to be, the one who was buried alive. Now let's get into the how. How to love yourself for real.

Get rid of the idea that self love is a feeling. It might be hard to accept. But when you've never met love in its true and pure form, you have no point of reference. So if you're truly interested in getting to know yourself, in seeing and loving yourself in all that you are, you will have to accept that the actions of self-love come way before the feelings of self-love. People who love themselves are people who take actions that are good and healthy for them, regardless of how they feel.

Self-love isn't what you feel in the absence of self-loathing. It's what you do with the self-loathing. It's how you relate to it, how you observe it, how you interact with it. Now that you've accepted this, you'll stop waiting for others to tell you who you are or who to be. You uncover yourself how you actively learn yourself. Treat yourself, how you treat the people you have a crush on. Develop a near obsessive curiosity towards yourself.

Sit in silence and ask, what do I actually like? What do I actually want? What hurts me? And why have I been pretending it doesn't? Where do I like to go? What do I hate? Who do I like? What makes me uncomfortable? How do I feel around those people? What brings me joy? Start with these questions. Go deep. Think about all the times you muted your natural instincts. That's where your answers lie. And be honest. You've got to learn to see yourself without a filter.

So make it a daily practice, especially in these early days, to sit down and learn something new about yourself. Some things will surprise you, others will feel familiar. Some will make you cry, cringe, or laugh. Some will make you sad. But it's your job to become an expert on yourself. Just like people study to become engineers and physicists become your own subject matter. Write it somewhere. Make a video diary. Call somebody and tell them what you've learned.

My phone is filled with voice notes and video diaries about Perl, and I make them with excitement, anger, sadness, whatever comes up for me. That's what we do when we're interested in other people. Why should you exclude yourself from that? So now that we're getting to know who you are at your core, you have to reparent them. The forgotten you. The version of you that never got to speak. The version of you that couldn't exist without violence.

The one who had to bite their tongue and sit on their hands. The one who couldn't rest or ask for more. They are waiting to be pulled into the light. And it's not going to be easy. Loving yourself means unlearning the belief that you're only lovable when you're easy. Start tending to your inner child like they matter because they do. You do that by allowing them to exist. You slowly start choosing them. To many people around you, it might seem out of character, like you're acting brand new.

It's up to you whether you want to tell them about your journey, but this step is about doing all the things that feel natural to you, but that you had to hide to be accepted. This might look like saying no to things you used to say yes to. It might look like stopping yourself when you feel the urge to suppress who you are. For me, a simple example was stopping the fake reactions. I allowed myself to be flat and unresponsive to things that didn't strike an emotional chord.

It could be reducing how much of your thoughts and speech you edit before sharing. It could be asking for help with things you used to power through because that's what adults do. Maybe other adults don't need help with it, but you do. You do. So ask for help. Be gentle with yourself. You might feel more childish or irritable during this time, but it's necessary. You're literally taking care of a child who never saw the light.

And this is where your inner critic will come into play. You have to turn down the volume. Being someone who is always been afraid to exist means that all the accusations and wounds you've accumulated become the voice within. Long after the bullying or whatever happened to you, you become your own bully, your own abuser. That voice that says you're too much, you're not enough. Who do you think you are? You're being difficult.

That voice is not truth. It's memory. It's the internalized soundtrack of a world that taught you self rejection before you ever had a chance to love yourself. You don't have to silence it completely, but you do need to stop obeying it. If you want to stop hiding, you need to feed a new voice. I'm not here to promise you that the critic will disappear. Mine hasn't. She still shows up some days louder than others. But here's what's changed.

When she speaks, there's another voice that speaks back. The lover. The one I've been building slowly, gently, daily. Because the reason your critic feels so loud, so visceral, is because you've been feeding them every time you perform, instead of feel. Every time you abandon yourself to avoid conflict, every time you swallow your truth just to be liked. You feed the critic. You starve the self. So the healing it doesn't come from silencing the critic.

It comes from starving them, from shifting your focus from choosing every day to feed the lover instead. You don't have to believe that new voice yet. You don't even have to feel worthy of it. You just have to let it exist. Block out time. Five minutes, ten minutes if you can, and speak life into yourself. Speak love into your life even if it feels fake. Especially if it feels fake. Say I'm trying. I'm learning. I am enough.

I am allowed to be soft. I am allowed to rest. I don't have to earn love today. Do it every day. Then come talk to me. Because at some point. Day 30. Day 90, day 150, you will have a moment, an epiphany. That voice of love. That whisper you barely trusted at first. It will no longer feel like a stranger. It will feel like home. And the critic? Yes. She still speaks.