Some time ago, we were chatting with my friend P. about role play, both the tabletop, and the bedroom kind. He mentioned something I’ve heard from many other folks: stepping into a role sometimes feels awkward, it feels funny, and it takes energy. I very much have the opposite experience: stepping into a role lightens my mental load. Why is that?

For some background, I don’t think it was always like that. As a child and teenager, I was fairly oblivious to and later did not care for, the ways in which I was presenting. When I started having my first flirting thoughts, it started entering the picture. But it was only a few years later in university, after investing the time to learn nonverbal (and in general) communication, that things really started to click.

It dawned on me that people have a bunch of ideas and stereotypes which they constantly project on everyone they see. It was often very easy, and very fun for my brain to identify a some of those, and just play to them. Soon, I started actually enriching what these very stereotypical personas presented - for example while supervising test taking I would use the sound of my footsteps, or before entering offices to fix their computer issues I would mess up my hair a bit. These were very much stock characters, and yet people honestly didn’t want or need me to be much more than that character in those interactions.

Simultaneously I also built up my personal presentation to better reflect my values, or at least my ideal values. Yet that one is so much harder. I have about 10 pins on my bag, but to really express the things that make me tick, I’d need thousands. For every word I choose to say or write, there are countless more I do not. The fullness of my person is impossible to ever communicate, let alone present. This is often a burden. You see the most beautiful person ever on the street and they look back, and there is just one version of you that they see. A friend tells you a life changing event, and you only get one first sentence which they will remember for the rest of their life.

Yet for me personally, even if the friend is not there to tell you the life changing event, I do (sometimes) consider how I present as I go about my life. What would the audience think about the old coffee stain in his sweatpants? Where is the camera as he’s dancing alone in the street at 2 am? What’s the soundtrack?