28/04/2026
There's a difference between hiding and masking, and I think it matters.
Hiding is what happens when you've decided the real you isn't safe to show. So you make your life smaller, you cancel the thing, you don't put your hand up, you say you're fine. It's exhausting because you're not just performing for the room, you're performing for yourself, constantly editing out the parts that feel like too much.
Masking on the other hand is the part of you that learned, quite rightly, that not every room is safe, not every person can hold you, and that some contexts genuinely require you to turn certain things down. The part that masks has been protecting you for years, and it's been good at its job.
The problem isn't the masking. It's when there's nowhere to take it off.
A few years ago I walked into a personal development retreat carrying a question: "Who am I?" And I mean that literally, not as a philosophical exercise. I'm many things, I've always been many things, and somewhere in the effort of showing up as the right version for the right room, I could feel all the versions of me, but I couldn't feel who I really was underneath them. The multifacetedness I actually love about myself had become the hiding place.
That's why I'm so deliberate about the spaces I hold - Brand Collective Oxfordshire, and my workshops, they're not just events. They exist in the form they are, because I know what it costs when there's nowhere to take the mask off. Walk in as the polished one, the capable one, the one who has it together, if that's what you need. Or don't. Come as you are on the day.
I have a workshop coming, and I'm going to open the doors soon, so if any of this landed for you, watch this space.
Most people don't need fixing. They just need somewhere they don't have to perform.
