Somewhere between the salad and the entrée, I caught myself running a version of me from age fourteen, lightly varnished to look current.
I had dinner with my parents last weekend, in a restaurant near their house in London, and somewhere between the salad and the main course I noticed something that I'm still trying to figure out what to do with.
The realization arrived quietly. We were talking about something innocuous—a holiday they'd taken, a friend of theirs who'd had surgery, the weather. I was responding in the way I always respond at these dinners. Cheerful, engaged, slightly funnier than I am elsewhere, modulated into a tone that fit the room. My mother was laughing at one of my stories. My father was nodding in his particular way. The dinner was, by every external metric, going well.
And in the middle of telling a story about my dogs in Bangkok, I had a thought that almost made me drop my fork. The thought was: they don't actually know me. They've never known me. They know an outline I've been performing since I was about fourteen, and I just slipped back into the outline without deciding to, and I've been doing it for so long that the outline feels more like me than I do.
I kept telling the dog story. I finished it on autopilot. My mother laughed in the right place. My father refilled my wine. I sat there with a piece of bread in my hand and felt, for a few seconds, an entirely strange thing, which was the experience of watching myself perform a version of myself that was so well-rehearsed I couldn't, in real time, locate the version doing the watching.
I want to write about this carefully, because I think it's a more common phenomenon than people admit, and because I'm still working out what it means.
The outline, and how it got drawn
I've been thinking, in the days since, about when the outline first got drawn.
I think it was around fourteen. I think every kid, somewhere in their early teens, figures out which version of themselves their parents respond best to, and gradually—not all at once—starts performing that version more and more, while the unperformed parts of themselves go somewhere else. Become private. Become hidden. Become, in some cases, lost entirely.
My outline, the one I was performing at dinner last weekend, has the following characteristics. The outline is cheerful. The outline is funny. The outline is a little self-deprecating but not too much. The outline tells stories that have neat endings. The outline does not bring up topics that don't have neat endings. The outline doesn't talk about things he's struggling with unless he's already worked out a punchline for the struggle. The outline asks after his parents with genuine interest, but doesn't volunteer interior material about himself unless asked. The outline is, in essence, the optimal son for the specific parents I have. Lovable, manageable, easy to brag about.
The outline is not exactly a lie. Everything in it is true about me, in some real sense. I am cheerful. I am funny. I do tell good stories. The lie isn't in any individual feature. The lie is in what's been left out. The outline contains the parts of me that work in the room. It doesn't contain the parts that don't. And the parts that don't, over twenty-four years of performing the outline, have been quietly excluded from the version of myself that gets activated whenever I sit down across the table from my parents.
What I felt, with the bread in my hand, was the strange recognition that the parts excluded from the outline are most of the parts I now think of as the actual me. The outline was, at fourteen, the version of me my parents could see. Twenty-four years later, the actual me has grown around it and past it and well outside it. And yet, when I sit down for dinner with them, the outline is what activates. The actual me sits down somewhere outside the restaurant and waits for the meal to end.
Why the outline keeps activating
I want to be honest about why, at thirty-eight, with quite a lot of self-knowledge, I still slip into the outline without deciding to.
It's not because my parents are forcing me to. It's not because they would punish me, in any obvious way, for showing up as the actual me. It's not even because I think they wouldn't love the actual me, though that fear is somewhere in the mix.
The outline activates because it is, by now, the most efficient way to have a dinner with my parents that ends well. The outline knows the contours of the conversation that will work. It knows which topics to bring up and which to avoid. It knows which version of me they expect, and providing that version produces a dinner that is, by every external measure, lovely.
Bringing the actual me to the dinner would be inefficient. It would introduce friction. It would require me to make decisions in real time about whether and how to share material that the outline knows how to handle but that the actual me would have to figure out from scratch. The outline is not a betrayal of myself. The outline is a labor-saving device. It allows me to have dinners with my parents without having to think.
The cost of this efficiency is what I felt at the table last weekend. The cost is that the dinners, no matter how lovely, are not actually with me. They are with the outline. My parents, who love me very much, are loving the outline. They have been loving the outline for two and a half decades. They don't know they're doing this. The outline is so well-performed that, from their angle, it's just me. The actual me, the one who sits outside the restaurant during the meal, has never been a guest at any of these dinners.
What the outline doesn't include
I want to try to describe, briefly, what's been excluded from the outline I perform for my parents, because I think it's useful to be specific.
The outline doesn't include the parts of me that are uncertain about my own life. The outline always sounds as if I know what I'm doing. The actual me, much of the time, doesn't. There are real, ongoing questions in my life—about whether I should still be living in Bangkok, about whether my work is what I want to be doing for the next decade, about whether I'm going about my relationships in a way that's working—and none of these questions get aired at family dinners. The outline answers all of these questions confidently and cheerfully. The actual me hasn't yet.
The outline doesn't include the parts of me that are sad. I don't mean clinically depressed. I just mean the ordinary background sadness that accompanies being a person in your late thirties. The small accumulated griefs. The friendships that have faded. The version of myself I thought I'd be by now and am not. The outline doesn't carry any of this. The outline is, by design, free of weather. The actual me has weather most days.
The outline doesn't include the parts of me that have changed in ways my parents haven't tracked. I'm a different person at thirty-eight than I was at twenty-eight, and a different person at twenty-eight than I was at eighteen. The outline I perform is mostly an updated version of the eighteen-year-old, with some surface adjustments to reflect the fact that I now live abroad and own dogs. The substantive shifts in who I am as a person—the values that have changed, the views I now hold, the things I now care about—are mostly absent from the outline, because the outline was set up before any of those shifts happened, and the outline has been more efficient to maintain than to update.
The outline, in short, is a version of me from twenty-four years ago, lightly varnished. The varnish is what makes it look current. Underneath, it's the same outline.
The thing I tried after dinner
After the dinner ended, after we'd walked back to my parents' house, after we'd had tea in the kitchen and my mother had gone to bed, I sat with my father in the living room for an hour. He was reading the paper. I was, ostensibly, on my phone.
I didn't plan what I did next. I think the realization at dinner had loosened something. I put my phone down. I waited until my father looked up from the paper. And I told him, in two sentences, something true about my life that wasn't in the outline. Nothing dramatic. Just a small honest piece of how I'd been feeling about something that's been on my mind for a few months.
My father looked at me for a few seconds. He folded the paper and put it on the side table. He said, "I didn't know that. Tell me a bit more."
We talked, for about twenty minutes, in a way I don't think I've ever talked to my father. The conversation wasn't transformative. He didn't say anything wise. I didn't say anything I hadn't said to other people. But it was, for those twenty minutes, the actual me at the dinner table, and the actual him on the other side. And we were, for a brief stretch, in the same room as each other for the first time in my adult life.
He went to bed shortly after. We didn't make a thing of it. The next morning, at breakfast, the outline was back. We talked about the weather. He asked about the drive to the station. I gave him the cheerful version. The brief twenty-minute experiment was over, and the regular programming had resumed.
But something had shifted. I knew, now, that the actual me could be in the room. The room could survive him. My father could meet him, briefly, and not flinch. The outline wasn't, as I'd assumed for twenty-four years, the only version of me that was viable in this house.
What I'm trying to do now
I'm not going to tell you I've solved this, because I haven't. The next dinner I have with my parents will, almost certainly, run on the outline again. The outline is too efficient to be retired in a single weekend.
What I'm trying to do is something smaller. I'm trying to bring, into each visit, one small piece of the actual me that the outline doesn't include. Not a big confession. Not a structured conversation. Just one sentence, dropped into the room, that the outline wouldn't have offered.
Each time I do this, I'm testing whether the room can hold it. Sometimes it can. Sometimes my father puts down the paper. Sometimes my mother asks a follow-up question. Sometimes the sentence lands flat and we move on. But each time the room holds even a small piece of the actual me, the outline gets fractionally less complete. The actual me gets fractionally more present. The dinners, very slowly, become less performances and more meals.
I have, I estimate, twenty more years of these dinners, if I'm lucky. That's not very many. I don't want to spend them all in outline mode. I'd like, before my parents die, for them to have actually met me. Not the version they've been loving for twenty-four years. The current one. The one outside the restaurant, who's been waiting, mostly, to be invited in.
The invitation, it turns out, has to come from me. My parents aren't going to issue it. They don't know they're talking to an outline. They think they're talking to me. The only way they're going to find out otherwise is if I, slowly and carefully, introduce them to the actual man who's been their son this whole time.
That's the project of my forties, I think. Or the start of it.
The salad arrived. The conversation flowed. The outline performed beautifully. And somewhere outside the restaurant, the actual me made a quiet decision that next time, he was going to come in for at least the entrée.
