For founders and high-achieving professionals who became people pleasers to survive, and now feel trapped in a borrowed life.
All the world’s a stage, but we are no longer ‘merely players’, as Shakeshear would have us believe. The performative and predetermined life in the modern sense is more of a willing compromise rather than ‘as destined’, defined 2,500 years ago in ancient Athens, when actors, then known as hypokrites, wore hollow wooden masks called prosopa. Hypokrites just meant the one who answered from behind the face and not as we know the word today - hypocrite. The mask then was not hiding the actor, but was the actor. The performance and the person were the same thing. From prosopa came the Latin persona. From persona came personality, personal brand, and personal best. Every word we use to describe ourselves today traces back to a mask somebody wore in a theatre two-and-a-half thousand years ago. But the irony is that today the personality itself has become the mask as we go about ‘performing’. I have been performing for as long as I can remember.
From the streets of Kathmandu to sleeping on airport floors, I had learned early that the world rewarded certain versions of me and punished others. Every time I levelled up, the room demanded something more polished, more dependable, more strategic, and the cost of entry was always the same: the mask. I paid it without thinking, because the alternative was ‘being left outside’. What I did not see was what I was leaving behind each time. The rugged zero-to-one builder who rolled up his sleeves and figured things out in small rooms with smart people. The one who got lost in problems and forgot to eat when the work was good. That version of me was useful at certain stages and inconvenient at others. The further up I went, the more inconvenient it became. By the time I reached the room I had spent fifteen years trying to enter, I was not sure the person who had wanted it so badly was still there.
I was dying in the thing I was incredibly good at.
No villains in this circuit
Psychotherapist Pete Walker spent decades studying how people survive environments where their authentic self is not safe, and what he found was that the least discussed of the four threat responses (fight, flight, freeze, and fawn) is the one that gets you promoted. The fawn response is the nervous system's strategy of choice when you grew up in an environment where pleasing the powerful person was the cheapest path to survival. You learn to scan their face, micro-adjust, and disappear into accommodation. The threat passes. You live another day. Then you grow up, walk into your first office, and the fawn circuit lights up, and the boss says, " We love how you handle people.”
It starts earlier than that, though. A father decides what success looks like, and to be loved at home, you perform the version he can recognise. I remember the first time I brought home marks my father did not find impressive. The silence at dinner that night was its own instruction. I learned, without being told, which version of me was welcome in that house. Then a teacher decided what intelligence meant. Then a boss decided what leadership looked like. Then, in seven minutes, an investor decided whether you were the kind of founder worth backing. Each one handed you a script, and you took it. You took it because you were afraid. Afraid of the silence at dinner. Afraid of the follow-up question that never came. Afraid of being left outside the room.
Reshma Saujani, who founded Girls Who Code and ran for US Congress against an incumbent before most people had heard her name, admitted to having built her entire life this way. A career that looked from the outside like pure ambition and grit. But what she said about it later was simpler: she had not been brave. She had been afraid. She was not climbing toward something she wanted, but was running from the terror of disapproval. The mask had been so good at its job for so long that she had stopped knowing the difference between the mask and the face.
Psychologist Robert Kegan found that seventy per cent of adults never write their own story. They borrow one from a father, a mentor, a boss, a friend, and live inside it without knowing it is borrowed. Surrounded by people doing the same thing, it almost becomes impossible to distinguish the borrowed life from a well-lived one. It looks like a great life. But it just is not yours.
The cost nobody names
This pattern does not hit everyone equally. It strikes hardest at the people who started from humble circumstances and clawed their way up through achievement and sheer will. I know this from the inside. I grew up understanding that the version of me that got to stay was the version that performed. My childhood taught me that safety depends on competence, that love is conditional on success, and that your value is measured by what you produce.
So when I walked into the professional world, it rewarded everything I had already learned: work hard, be reliable, do not make waves, always have your act together. It felt like confirmation. The workplace became an echo chamber for the survival patterns I had built as a child. And the fear keeping me in the chameleon suit was never irrational. It was based on real observation. I had seen what happened to people who stood out too much, who took risks and lost, who spoke up and were cut down.
What I could not see from inside the suit was that the environment had changed. The risk that was real at fifteen was imaginary at thirty. I was no longer in that room, and yet I kept dressing for it. Ironically, the fawn response is the only one of the four threat responses that gets you a bonus. Fight back, and you are labeled difficult. Run away, and you are called uncommitted. Freeze, and you get managed out. But fawn: scan the room, adjust, accommodate, make everyone feel heard. They call it emotional intelligence and put it on your performance review. The thing that is quietly hollowing you out is the thing they keep promoting you for.
And the real cost of that success is loss of agency, when someone else decides for you what is good or bad for you. When someone else decides what matters, what is worth your time, what you should feel proud of, and what you should feel afraid of. You have outsourced yourself so completely, for so long, that you no longer notice the transaction happening. That is what sovereignty means. Not independence, not quitting your job. It is the signal that tells you that what matters in your life should come from inside, not from reading someone else's face.
You know your agency is gone when you stop feeling joy, not suddenly but gradually. Where joy used to arrive, relief shows up instead. Peace feels wrong, stillness feels like something is missing. So you find a problem to solve, a risk to manage, a conversation to have. It is not out of necessity, but because struggle is the only state that feels like you. I ran this pattern for fifteen years and called it drive.
