The Quiet Exhaustion of Keeping Parts of Yourself Hidden
The reality is that we all too often filter and curate ourselves according to the situation, circumstances, and environment.
How many of your friends do you think are truly themselves around you? At work? At home? The reality is that we all too often filter and curate ourselves according to the situation, circumstances, and environment.
We’re unlikely to turn up to a funeral in a bikini. Equally, we probably aren’t going to wear a three-piece suit to the beach.
All of us hide something of ourselves. It’s why we very rarely (I’d hope) tell people to fuck off when we don’t agree with them in work meetings.
The most exhausting thing is not hiding who you are, but carrying the constant awareness that you are doing it.
I’ve written before about how we curate our lives like museum exhibitions, showing only the polished pieces whilst hiding anything that might be considered flawed or messy. But the exhaustion doesn’t come from hiding the flawed pieces. It comes from the ongoing maintenance of deciding, moment by moment, what stays visible and what stays contained.
I’m not talking about dramatic secrets, like the fact you have a whole other family in the town next door and they just think you travel for work a lot.
It is about how we all edit ourselves in small, continuous ways, because we think this makes it easier for others to accept us. We are choosing which stories to tell, which jokes to tell. We suppress reactions that might be misunderstood. Yet this is tiring, our brain is constantly on alert. We are not living a lie. We are simply never quite whole - a complete, authentic person. Having someone in our lives with whom the drawbridge is fully lowered is rare, and an amazing privilege.
The symptoms are quiet and easy to misread, it’s social tiredness without an obvious cause. We want connection, but could we avoid certain situations that might be too exhausting? Maybe it manifests as introversion, but is actually just us not wanting to lower the drawbridge.
Research by Dale Larson and colleagues, who reviewed 137 studies involving over 40,000 participants, found that chronic self-concealment consistently correlates with depression, anxiety, fatigue, and weaker relationships - not because of what is hidden, but because hiding fractures attention. Part of your mind is always elsewhere, managing what stays visible. You cannot rest when you are constantly monitoring yourself.
This applies broadly. Anyone who has learned that visibility equals risk, that emotional clarity equals weakness, that being understood is optional, develops skill at functional connection and emotional self-containment. The cost is being rarely seen at full resolution.
People often think the solution is acceptance. “If I were more accepted, I would be less tired.” But the truth sits elsewhere. “If I were more integrated, I would be less tired.”
Integration is not the same as disclosure. You do not need to tell people everything. You do not need radical transparency or performative vulnerability. Integration means fewer internal edits. It means not splitting your attention between the conversation happening outside and the one happening inside your head about what is safe to say.
The exhaustion is not a personal failing. It is information. It signals that something essential has been muted for too long, not because it is wrong, but because constant self-monitoring is tiring.
Most of the time, the protection you are maintaining is no longer necessary. Most of the time, the editing you are doing serves an old fear rather than a present danger. The work is not in never hiding. The work is in noticing when you are doing it and asking whether it is still needed.
You are allowed to take up the amount of space your inner life actually requires. Not dramatically. Not performatively. Just truthfully.
This resonates in my soul 🙏✨️