I’m sitting on the floor of the nursery at 2:14 AM and I’ve been staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling for twenty minutes. It’s a strange thing, how humans are hard-wired for social mimicry. We have these mirror neurons that practically force us to conform to the expectations of the herd just to ensure our survival, or at least our social standing. When I was seventeen, my herd was the varsity football team. I was the starting middle linebacker, which is a position that requires a specific kind of aggressive, unthinking kinetic energy. But the reality is that I was living in a state of constant, exhausting cognitive dissonance. I’d spend my afternoons practicing how to collapse a pocket and my nights reading Sylvia Plath under the covers with a flashlight. The locker room was the worst part. It wasn't just the smell of stale sweat and laundry detergent—it was the atmospheric pressure of the "masculine performance." I remember this one specific Tuesday after a double-session. The guys were passing around a phone, looking at some leaked photos of a girl in the grade below us. The things they were saying... it was visceral and base. I felt this physical revulsion, a literal tightening in my chest, but when the phone got to me, I didn't say anything to stop it. I laughed. I made a comment—something about her body that I won't even type out because it’s so far removed from who I actually am. I remember the sound of my own voice hitting the tiled walls and feeling like I was watching a stranger speak. I was participating in the erasure of my own empathy just to stay "in." I had this notebook, a blue Moleskine, hidden in the lining of my duffel bag. It was filled with these fragments of verse about the way the stadium lights looked against the October mist, how they looked like "dying giants breathing gold." If any of those guys had found it, it would have been social suicide. In that environment, sensitivity is seen as a pathology. You have to be blunt-force trauma personified. So I leaned into it. I became the loudest one, the one who’d initiate the crude banter, the one who’d mock the "theatre kids" the hardest. I was overcompensating for the fact that my internal world was built of metaphors and iambic pentameter. I was a double agent in my own life. The problem is that once you start performing a role, the mask starts to fuse to your skin. I’m thirty-one now. I’m a stay-at-home father, which is its own kind of isolation, a different flavor of performative identity. I spend my days managing nap schedules and researching the physiological milestones of toddler development, but I still feel like that boy in the locker room. I’m still hiding. My wife knows I like to read, sure, but she doesn't know about the three hundred poems I’ve written and deleted over the last decade. She thinks I’m "stoic" and "reliable." She sees the linebacker, not the person who gets choked up looking at the way the light hits a bowl of cereal in the morning. There’s this psychological concept called "masking" that usually refers to neurodivergence, but I think it applies to the general human condition too. We all have these fractured selves. I look at my son in his crib and I wonder when he’ll start building his own cage. When will he realize that the world has a very narrow definition of what a man is allowed to feel? I want to tell him it’s okay to be soft, but I’m still too terrified to be soft myself. I’ve spent fifteen years perfecting this version of me that is "normal" and "well-adjusted" and "masculine" in the traditional sense, and I don't know how to stop. Last week, I ran into one of my old teammates at the grocery store. He’s a partner at a law firm now, looks exactly the same but with more expensive hair. We did the whole "manly" greeting—the firm handshake, the slap on the shoulder, the shallow talk about the local sports teams. And for a second, I felt that old familiar itch to say something crude, just to confirm that I was still part of the tribe. It’s a reflex. A survival instinct that doesn't know the war is over. I walked away feeling this profound sense of ontological dread. If everyone is just reacting to everyone else's performance, does the "real" version of anyone actually exist? I think we’re all just terrified of being truly perceived. To be known is to be vulnerable, and to be vulnerable is to be at risk. So we stick to the script. We join the banter. We hide the poetry in the lining of our bags and we wait for a moment that never comes where it feels okay to take it out. I haven't written a single line in six months. The words are there, I can feel them buzzing under my skin like an electrical current, but I’ve suppressed them for so long that they’ve become a foreign language I can no longer speak fluently. I’m just tired. I’m tired of the "we" and the "us" and the generalities. I’m tired of being the guy who laughs at the joke he hates. I’m tired of being a stay-at-home dad who feels like he has to justify his existence by being "handy" or "tough" around the house. I just want to sit in a room and admit that I am sensitive and that I love things that are fragile. But then I think about the locker room, the smell of the Tiger Balm, the way the guys looked at me when I made that joke... and I realize I’m still that seventeen-year-old kid, desperately hoping no one looks too closely at my bag. It's pathetic, really. To be this age and still be afraid of a bunch of ghosts from high school. But that's the thing about those years—they don't just end. They just become the basement of your personality, and you’re always walking around on the floor above them, trying not to let the boards creak.