The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

Erving Goffman, the sociologist whose 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, which I may have clung to like a life raft during freshman year rush week, famously argued that life is a stage. We adapt our expressions, gestures, and behaviors depending on the audience, carefully managing the version of ourselves we present. There’s a front stage—polished, public, rehearsed—and a backstage, where we can supposedly exhale and exist without performance.

But the problem—the one we see again and again as therapists—is what happens when the backstage never materializes.

Goffman’s premise is simple: social life is theater. Every interaction requires a performance, tailored to meet the expectations of an audience. If we're lucky, we retreat backstage to rest and reconnect with the parts of ourselves not meant for public view. But for many people, especially those navigating chronic marginalization or trauma, the performance never ends. The backstage never arrives and survival becomes bound to the act itself.

Masking, often discussed in autistic communities, refers to the invisible labor of suppressing natural behaviors in order to be accepted by others. Eye contact, tone, posture, speech—everything is monitored and adjusted. Masking isn’t about fitting in; it’s about protection from exclusion.

Across cultures, masking has long been a survival strategy. In Japanese culture, tatemae (public face) and honne (true feelings) describe the split between the self presented to society and the private self kept hidden. In Black American culture, masking often takes the form of constant code-switching—carefully moderating language, tone, and expression to protect both oneself and one’s community from surveillance and violence.

Queer people, people in nonmonogamous relationships, and anyone whose ways of loving or expressing desire fall outside cultural norms often mask not only for their own safety but to protect those they love from misunderstanding and harm. This is why people who mask often feel most at ease in between spaces—at the edges of cultures, relationships, and identities, where expectations blur and no single audience demands full allegiance. These thresholds offer brief relief from constant performance—a place where the self doesn’t have to be fully carved up or concealed. Over time the possibility for meaningful relationships begins to flatten under the weight of the performance, as the backstage—a space where connection might finally be unguarded—never materializes.

For many, the performance started in childhood. Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child describes how children in unsafe environments become experts at reading the room, suppressing their needs to maintain attachment. They become helpers, achievers, peacekeepers—whatever the moment requires. Over time, the performance and the self become indistinguishable.

When masking is lifelong and high-stakes, something else happens too: compulsions and addictions become the substitute backstage. These are often misunderstood as pathology, but in reality, they are what hold the mask— and safety— in place. Compulsions—rituals of checking, reassurance, replaying—try to control the fear that the act might slip. Addictions—work, people-pleasing, substances, food, doom-scrolling—numb the weight of constant self-monitoring.

Together, they create a false backstage, a place to retreat—at least internally—from the strain of performance. But it’s not real rest. And when even these supports collapse, dissociation becomes the final strategy. The body keeps performing, but the self exits. You smile. You nod. But you're no longer there. This is why “unmasking” can feel impossible. It’s not just discomfort. The body remembers what happened the last time it showed up authentically: rejection, violence, abandonment. The nervous system holds that history and resists the idea that it could ever be safe to stop performing.

Goffman showed us how performance shapes public life, but its deeper cost is how it erodes private life. Chronic masking doesn’t just create exhaustion—it severs connection. When you're always performing, intimacy becomes impossible. How can you feel close to others when no one is meeting the real you? Over time, the distance grows inward. You lose touch with what you feel, what you want, who you are—flattened in service of the role.

This is why the goal of therapy is never to rip away the mask. It’s there for good reason. It is the scaffolding of safety. Therapy doesn’t begin by tearing down our protections but by asking:

Is it still dangerous?

What’s true now?

And slowly, carefully, we begin to build a life where the answer might one day be no.