Why I Refuse to Perform My Mental Illness for Others
A few years ago, sitting in a waiting room in Fitzroy, I watched a woman rehearse how she would describe her panic attacks to a new GP. She softened them, made them sound manageable, almost quaint. She smiled when she said "anxiety," as if telling a story about a mildly inconvenient cousin. I knew the choreography because I had done it myself, in waiting rooms in Brunswick and Northcote, in job interviews, in family group chats. We learn very early that how we describe our distress is rarely ours alone. It belongs to the listener.
Performing a mental illness does not mean lying about symptoms. It means editing them, cutting the inconvenient parts, the messy parts, the parts that make people uncomfortable. It means swapping "I cannot get out of bed three days a week" for "I get a bit overwhelmed sometimes." We do this because the cost of being believed as we actually are is often higher than the cost of being believed as we are not.
This essay is a quiet refusal. I want to talk about the labour of performing, why the script is so deeply gendered, and what it looks like to stop. The piece sits alongside my longer notes on the intersection of social justice and mental health, because the two are not separable. To perform your illness is to perform your identity. To refuse the performance is, often, the first political act available to someone told their mind is a private problem.
The audience problem: who we edit ourselves for
Mental illness is one of the few conditions whose legitimacy is constantly negotiated. Someone with a broken wrist does not have to prove their pain by walking normally. Someone with depression is expected to perform enough sadness to be taken seriously, but not so much that they become uncomfortable. The audience is always present, even when no one is watching.
I notice this most with people I want to impress. On a first date in Collingwood, a difficult winter becomes "a rough patch." On the phone with my mum in Queensland, it becomes "a bit of a slog." With a trusted friend, it becomes the truth: months of not eating properly, a return of the insomnia I thought I had outgrown. The truth takes more energy. It also takes more trust.
The audience problem extends beyond intimacy. It runs through workplaces, where "mental health day" often means anything except an actual mental health day. It runs through universities in Melbourne and Sydney, where students learn to describe their stress in language HR will recognise. It runs through Centrelink appointments, where the wrong word can shorten a plan. Every context asks for a different cut of the same person, and the cutting becomes its own disorder.
The difference between advocacy and performance
There is a meaningful difference between talking openly about mental illness as advocacy and performing it as audience management. Advocacy assumes the listener can hold what they hear. Performance assumes they cannot, and adjusts the story accordingly. Both can involve the same facts; the difference is the relationship to the listener's comfort.
Advocacy, when honest, names the boring and the unromantic. It describes the afternoon spent staring at a wall, not the breakthrough at sunset. It talks about medication side effects, the cost of a psychologist where gap fees keep climbing, the small humiliations of recovery. It lets the illness be what it is.
Performance has a structure. It has a beginning, a middle, and a tidy resolution. It is calibrated to a specific emotional response: pity, admiration, reassurance. It reassures the listener that the speaker is okay now, or will be soon. The speaker becomes a mirror, reflecting back whatever the listener needs to see in order to feel safe. That is a service we are taught to provide, often from childhood.
| Authentic disclosure |
Performative disclosure |
| Centres the speaker's actual experience |
Centres the listener's comfort |
| Includes inconvenient, unresolved details |
Edits out ambiguity and mess |
| Holds space for ongoing difficulty |
Promises a tidy resolution |
| Trusts the listener to do something with the truth |
Trusts the listener only with curated emotion |
| Often feels tiring to deliver |
Often feels like a small performance high |
| Builds real, if slower, intimacy |
Builds the illusion of intimacy quickly |
None of these contrasts are intended as a moral ranking. There are moments when a curated version of the truth is a legitimate act of self-protection, particularly in unsafe contexts. But there is a difference between protecting yourself and rehearsing a self that has little to do with the one you actually live inside.
Cultural scripts and the Australian context
Every culture writes its own script for acceptable distress. The Australian version is unusually specific. We prize laconic toughness, the "she'll be right" shrug, the larrikin self-deprecation, the beer-soaked acknowledgement that life is hard but, you know, cricket. Within that frame, the appropriate way to discuss mental illness is brief, jokey, and already in the past tense. Anything more lingering risks being read as indulgent, as un-Australian.
I have felt this in small ways. In a share house in Newtown, a flatmate described her bipolar diagnosis and was met with jokes that closed down the conversation. At a barbecue in Adelaide, a friend talked about his PTSD after a car accident on the South Eastern Freeway and someone said "yeah but you're walking, ay?" In a Perth office, a colleague took stress leave and came back to find her workload unchanged. The climate is the same.
Common Australian scripts for distress
Some of the most common Australian scripts for distress sound a little like this:
- "Yeah, she's had a bit of a rough trot, but she's getting there."
- "I'm right. Just knackered. Long arvo."
- "Bad week, ay. Anyway, how's the footy going?"
- "Look, I don't want to make a big thing of it."
- "She'll be right once the lexapro kicks in, supposedly."
- "It's fine. I just need a holiday. A long one."
Each is a polite seal on a larger container. They allow the conversation to continue without anyone having to do anything with the information. The line between coping and performing is not always clear.
The script is gendered. Women are expected to perform care, even when depleted. Men are expected to perform stoicism, even when it is costing them. Bisexual people, who already do identity work in heterosexual spaces, do extra labour around disclosure. The scripts are old. They are being rewritten, slowly, in suburban living rooms, in community centres, in regional towns where the local library is the only free warm room.
How to stop performing: practical scripts
Refusing to perform is not a single decision. It is a set of small, repeated choices, often made in conversations you did not plan to have. The work is to stop defaulting to the rehearsed version whenever you open your mouth.
The shift does not require a dramatic disclosure. It can be as small as refusing to round off an answer. It can be as quiet as saying "I don't want to talk about it" instead of inventing a tidy ending. The size of the refusal is not the point. The point is that it is yours.
Scripts to keep in your back pocket
A few I have practised, sometimes badly, sometimes well. They are scripts you can edit, to give your nervous system a familiar shape to fall back on:
- "I'm not really in a place to make that sound tidier than it is."
- "That actually happened quite recently and I'm still in it."
- "I appreciate you asking, but the honest answer is longer than this moment allows."
- "I'd rather tell you the real version than the one I usually tell."
- "I don't have a lesson from it yet."
- "I'm still figuring that out and I'd rather not perform the answer for you."
Each is a small refusal. They are, in their own way, a kind of care for both people in the conversation, because they replace the polite fiction with something the listener can hold. If too direct, soften the edges. If too soft, sharpen them. The work is not to say them perfectly. The work is to say them at all.
Boundaries as feminist practice
There is a long feminist tradition of naming the labour we are asked to do. This includes performing our distress in ways that make others comfortable. If you have read my essay on saying no, you will recognise the shape of the argument. The boundary is not a punishment of the other person. It is a recognition that your energy has a destination, and that destination is, finally, your own life.
Setting these boundaries often costs us something. It costs us the easy version of a conversation, the relief of being seen as fine. It sometimes costs us the relationship, particularly if the relationship was built on the curated self. Removing the performance of wellness can leave a gap in the room that other people will try to make you responsible for filling again.
Refusing to perform also means accepting that some people will not like the unedited version of you. They will find it too heavy, too slow to resolve. That is information about them, not a verdict on you. There are other people, often quieter, often harder to find, who will hold what you actually are without needing you to make it sing. They are worth the slower pace of finding.
If you only take one thing from this piece, let it be this. The next time you are asked how you are, in the lift at work, in the group chat, across a kitchen table in Brisbane or Bendigo, try the smallest refusal of the rehearsed answer. Let the pause be longer than usual. Use a slightly less polished word. See what it costs you, and what it opens up. Mental illness is not a story we owe other people. Your mind is not a piece of theatre. The performance was never yours to give, and the refusal, however small, is one of the most honest things you can offer the next person who genuinely wants to know how you are.
