Last week, I caught myself mid-conversation, my voice climbing an octave higher than natural, my face frozen in a smile that had nothing to do with joy. I was performing again, shapeshifting in real time to fit whatever space I thought the room needed me to occupy. In that moment, I recognized the familiar ache of what I call the double C's: contort and chase.
For as long as I can remember, I've excelled at both. We're often told not to shrink, to take up space boldly. Yet the world also asks many of us to contort ourselves to survive. That contradiction leaves us twisted into unrecognizable shapes, chasing validation that always seems just out of reach.
The Art of Survival Shapeshifting
Even when I hold presence in a room, I still contort. My raspy voice becomes unnaturally high-pitched. My resting expression turns into a mask of peaceful compliance. Neither reflects my natural state. They're survival mechanisms, refined through years of reading rooms and adjusting.
When I think of contortion, two images come to mind. One is the beauty of Cirque du Soleil performers, bending by choice, as art. The other is "Strange Fruit," a reminder that bodies have also been bent and broken by force. That history sits underneath the question I keep asking myself: how much of my bending is chosen, and how much is still shaped by pressure I didn't create?
My honest answer is that the contortion I practice is chosen, yes, but not freely. It's survival, not art.
The Relentless Pursuit
I can credit much of my career success to mastering the chase. I've chased money, prestige, and that peculiar fiction we call the American Dream.
The programming is everywhere: "the thrill of the hunt," "playing hard to get." We're taught that wanting something means pursuing it, and that worth must be earned through constant reaching. It's a hamster wheel of pursuit, always aimed at something shiny kept just beyond our grasp, and often the very thing that costs us most.
The Cost of Performance
Together, contorting and chasing led me to believe less in myself, even in environments that rewarded my abilities. They taught me to buy into systems I didn't actually believe in, and to chase labels and markers of worth that felt hollow once I had them.
Don't get me wrong. I still love a good pair of Banana Republic work pants (long legs require specific accommodations). I'm talking about the deeper labels, the ones that promise belonging but deliver isolation and require you to keep going despite the cost to who you are.
This is the line between voluntary and coerced contortion. Sometimes we bend willingly, thinking we're making strategic choices, only to realize the pressure came from systems so pervasive we mistook them for our own desires.
The Awakening
Some of the things I held dear were working against me. How many of us thought we had "arrived," only to discover the destination wasn't what we were promised? Success, as it was sold to us, can become another kind of confinement.
The unlearning has been both painful and liberating. It has meant recognizing that holding space doesn't require contorting myself into palatability. It has meant understanding that real connection doesn't require a chase, because it isn't running away.
Finding Peace Beyond Performance
On this gloomy yet strikingly beautiful Monday in Chicago, I find myself striving less and enjoying more. Instead of scanning rooms to decide who I should become, I practice staying rooted in who I am.
This doesn't mean abandoning ambition. It means telling the difference between real desire and programmed pursuit, between strategic adaptation and soul-crushing contortion. And it isn't only personal. In teams and organizations, the same pattern shows up as people performing competence instead of bringing their full judgment to the work. That gap costs everyone.
Every person who steps off the wheel of performance and pursuit makes room for others to do the same. In a world that profits from our exhaustion, choosing presence over performance becomes a quiet revolution.
We deserve more than survival. We deserve to exist as ourselves, unchased and uncontorted, in all our magnificent, messy humanity.
Unlearning with Love,
Ja'Nohn