Sky blue shirt, navy pants, black belt and shoes
The corporate costume.
The uniform that’s meant to signal professionalism but actually signals replaceability, sameness, anything but professional or unique.
You get to the train and see the rest of the clones in a sea of “professional” attire.
At the office we sit in rows. Staring at screens head phones on so you don’t have to listen to Laura stirring her cup of tea incessantly banging the metal spoon inside the cup like she’s trying to dig her way out.
What the fuck am I doing here?
I’ve always known I’m not like them, but at times I’ve wanted to be.
Fit in.
Blend in.
Pass as one of the responsible adults who apparently enjoy this shit.
But I asked for this life.
I worked fucking hard for this life.
Studied. Ate shit. Got a job. Ate more shit to get a foot on another rung of the ladder I thought I wanted to climb, like Nirvana was waiting at the top.
I wanted the sense of self importance that comes from doing work no one will remember in a fortnight.
But the truth is, I’m terrible at pretending.
No one believes the act.
Not me, not them, and certainly not Frank.
Evey Sunday night the dread gets heavier.
Like my body is staging a protest my brain refuses to acknowledge.
The space between the life I want and the life I’m living only exists because of a pay cheque I don’t know how to replace.
Each week the gap gets wider.
Not because the job is awful, but because I’m tired of lying to myself about wanting it.
I thought this was the life I wanted.
Now it feels like a faded photocopy of someone else’s dream.
And every alternative looks like a slightly different shade of navy.
A life so dull it makes you question how you got here in the first place.
At the top of the ladder.
Nothing up here but more shit of a different flavour and price point.
At other times I downplayed my ability.
I shrank to fit the room.
Stayed small in a crowd of small people, because standing tall risks judgment, expectation, exposure.
For others it’s designer clothes.
Shiny cars.
A cultivated delusion of grandeur and self-importance.
A self-esteem costume stitched together from debt, insecurity, and the fear of being ordinary.
Whatever your style, there’s a veneer for it.
We all wear them.
A thin shell polished just enough to pass as confident, competent, stable, normal, or anything but normal, whatever the fuck “normal” is supposed to mean.
A protective gloss covering the dents, the doubts, the soft terrified inside.
Humans are shapeshifters, morphing into whatever the fuck is required so we’re not shunned from the tribe, cast out and left to our own devices.
We are experts at being anything but ourselves.
But the veneer you force yourself into always cracks, eventually.
There’s only so long you can mould yourself to fit a life built for someone else.
And when the veneer slips, even for a second, you feel it.
You stand up straight and realise your true height.
Not taller.
Just…unbound.
Pretending doesn’t feel dangerous at first.
It feels practical.
Like something adults do to get by.
Smile here.
Nod there.
Force enthusiasm like you’re squeezing the last of the toothpaste out of the tube.
Nothing dramatic. Nothing heroic. Just small compromises you tell yourself don’t matter.
But they do matter.
Every single one.
Pretending is a tax you pay in silence.
Not money, energy.
You drain yourself twice, once trying to appear like someone you’re not, and again dealing with the shame of knowing you’re full of shit.
You tell yourself it’s harmless, but pretending is cumulative.
It stacks.
“You’re fine.”
“I’m fine.”
“It’s fine.”
Meanwhile some part of you is quietly dying in the background, waiting for the moment you stop lying long enough to notice the smell.
The worst part is how stealthy it is.
No alarms.
No explosions.
Just a slow erosion of the person you actually are, sanded down grain by grain until you wake up one day and realise you’re not yourself anymore.
You’re just a collection of socially acceptable behaviours wearing a lanyard.
And the world rewards you for it.
That’s the trap.
You get praised for being easy going, professional, a team player, when in reality, you’re just exceptionally good at abandoning yourself in small increments.
You tell yourself you’re doing it to survive.
To belong.
To keep the lights on.
But every time you pretend, you reinforce the belief that the real you isn’t good enough to live in daylight.
That’s the real injury.
Not the job.
Not the uniform.
Not the corporate beige.
It’s the daily betrayal of yourself.
And pretending always sends you the bill. Eventually.
Every unfinished dream.
Every avoided conversation.
Every fear-based decision.
Every version of yourself you killed off just to blend in.
They all show up like overdue invoices with interest that compounds in regret.
The cost isn’t the effort.
The cost is the life you could have lived, paid for by your hopes, dreams, and self-respect.
It’s the life you don’t get to live while you’re busy living the life you don’t want.
But pretending doesn’t just drain you. It robs you. And it robs you of the only thing you can never earn back. Time.
Not minutes.
Not days.
Whole seasons of your life.
And what makes it dangerous is how quietly it happens.
You tell yourself you’re being sensible.
That you’re building experience.
That the timing isn’t right.
That you’ll change course later.
Later becomes years.
Wake up. Train. Desk. Lunch. Desk. Train. Sleep.
Repeat until unrecognisable.
You weren’t living.
You were loitering.
Hovering around your own life like a blue-ass fly circling the same pile of shit you refuse to deal with or walk away from.
And the worst part is you knew.
You knew the ladder was leaning against the wrong wall.
You knew the job didn’t fit.
You knew the Sunday dread wasn’t sustainable.
You knew the resentment was telling you something true.
But pretending was easier than choosing differently.
So you stayed.
The opportunity cost isn’t abstract.
It’s visceral.
It’s the places you didn’t go.
The risks you didn’t take.
The version of you that never got a chance to exist.
Nothing is more expensive than the life you didn’t live.
Pretending keeps the peace.
Pays the bills.
Makes your life look coherent from the outside.
So you stay.
Until the effort required to maintain the shape quietly exceeds the life you’re getting in return. The veneer you’ve been carrying around gets heavy.
You get tired in a way sleep doesn’t fix.
Achievements feel hollow.
The veneer starts to weigh more than it’s worth.
Because this is it.
This one.
This single, finite, non-refundable, non-fungible life you’ve been sleepwalking through like you had spares tucked away somewhere.
This is all you get.
And then the old line stops being clever and starts being true:
“A man has two lives, and the second begins when he realises he only has one”.
Once you feel that, ignoring it becomes impossible.
Because you realise that not only have you lost time, you’ve lost trust.
Your trust in yourself.
Every time you override what you know, you teach yourself not to listen.
Eventually, your own instincts feel unreliable.
You outsource decisions.
You hesitate.
You stay longer than you should.
You can’t build a stable life on a person you don’t trust.
Rebuilding that trust is slow.
Unglamorous.
But it starts the moment you stop betraying yourself in silence.
Honesty isn’t inspiring.
It’s awkward.
You stop smoothing things over.
You say no.
You let conversations go quiet.
Some relationships hold.
Some don’t.
Honesty costs you convenience.
But it gives you alignment.
And alignment feels better than a veneer ever could.
Because the veneer was never armour.
It was insulation.
It dulled the discomfort.
And cut off your air.
And once you’ve felt it, it won’t ever fit right again.
You can pretend again.
You can stay.
But you’ll know exactly what you’re doing.
And that knowledge doesn’t go away.