The Weight We Carry

This collection began as a series of blog posts.

It became, in the writing, something more: fifteen pieces — essays, short stories, and one narrative that sits between the two — that together make the argument that each piece alone could only approach. That the things we carry in private are the things that connect us most deeply to each other. That the weight of a human life, fully lived, is not a burden to be minimised. It is evidence of having been here.

The pieces are arranged in three acts. Act I: The Mask asks what we hide and why. Act II: The Damage asks what that hiding costs. Act III: The Return asks the only question that remains: what do we do now?

Each act contains essays and stories. The essays speak directly. The stories speak obliquely. They are designed to be read together — the essay opens the room, the story moves you further inside it.

The characters are fictional. The conditions they inhabit are not.

Read it in order, if you can. The pieces were written to accumulate — each one adding to the weight of what came before, so that by the time you reach the end, you are carrying something. Something you may not have had words for before you began.

That is the intention. That has always been the intention.

— Dr. Sonia Sharma

“The mask, worn long enough, stops feeling like a mask. It starts feeling like your actual face.”

— Dr Sonia Sharma

Every morning, millions of people stand in front of a mirror and put on a face that has nothing to do with what happened the night before.

The argument that ended at midnight. The child who cried until three. The diagnosis they haven't told anyone about yet. The marriage that has been, for some months now, conducting itself in a language of logistics — school pickups, grocery lists, whose turn it is to call the plumber — because the language of feeling has quietly, without announcement, gone out of use.

They look at the mirror. They arrange their face. And they go.

I did this for twenty-three years.

As a professional, my face at work was a specific instrument. Calibrated. Reassuring. Precise. Patients needed to believe I was in complete control of what I was doing to them — and I was, professionally. But there were days when I walked into that clinic carrying something so heavy that the act of setting it down at the door felt like physical labour. And nobody, not a single patient, ever knew. Because that is what professionals do. We perform competence so consistently that eventually, we forget it is a performance.

What I didn’t understand then — what I understand now, having spent years inside the heads of the characters I’ve created — is what that performance costs. Not visibly. Not immediately. But over time, in the way that a building settles: slowly, imperceptibly, and then all at once with a crack you didn’t see coming.

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Psychology has a name for this split. It is called surface acting — the deliberate management of outward expression while the internal emotional state remains unchanged. Research consistently shows that surface acting is significantly more exhausting than deep acting, which is when we actually shift our internal state to match the role we’re playing. The irony is that most of us don’t deep act. We don’t transform ourselves. We simply suppress ourselves, hour after hour, day after day, and call the suppression professionalism.

But I am not here to cite research. I am here to talk about something I’ve observed, in patients, in people I’ve loved, in characters that started as fiction and ended up feeling uncomfortably real: the cost of the mask is not paid at work. It is paid at home.

This is the part that nobody talks about.

We put on our best faces for strangers. To colleagues. To clients. To the woman at the reception desk, we’ll never see again. And we come home and give whatever is left to the people who are supposed to matter most. The people who have seen us without the mask — and who, over time, begin to feel the absence of any face at all. The partner who stopped asking how your day was because the answer was always fine.The children who learned not to need too much of you in the evenings because evenings were when you disappeared into the couch, into the phone, into the particular exhaustion that has no name because nobody has given us the permission to name it.

I’ve been told this is not a problem. That this is simply adulthood. That, this is how life works. And, for years, I told the same to my younger cousins and lately to my children till I realised, all the while we were broadcasting wrong information, wrong advice and carrying on wrong precedents which needed to be tinkered with. 

So, I disagree, starting now. I think it is one of the quietest crises of our time, and I think we have collectively agreed not to look at it directly because looking at it would require us to admit something uncomfortable: that we have, in our relentless effort to function - Stopped living.

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There is a specific kind of loneliness that lives inside full houses.

It is not the loneliness of the single person eating alone, which at least has the dignity of being legible, of being something you can point to and say: this is what it is. 

It is the loneliness of the person sitting at a dinner table surrounded by their own family, who feels, if they are honest — and most of us are only honest at three in the morning when the house is quiet, and there is nobody left to perform for — entirely unseen.

Because the mask doesn’t just hide us from the world. Over time, it hides us from ourselves. The best example of it if I can quote from a movie, is a scene from a Hindi movie titled Bala. The most iconic scene that I found was when you see Ayushman Khurana looking into his bathroom mirror, top of which is covered so that even in his most private moment, in his isolation too, he didn’t want to look at his bald head. We all have that bald spot on us that we refuse to see day after day.

When you spend long enough managing your expression, suppressing your reactions, archiving your authentic responses away for later — and later never comes — you begin to lose access to what you actually feel. You know what you are supposed to feel. You know what is appropriate to feel. But the raw, inconvenient, often irrational thing that is actually happening underneath? You’ve buried it so efficiently that you’d need an excavation to find it again.

This is what I mean when I say that the professional mask has a domestic cost. It is not just that we bring our tiredness home. It is that we bring our disconnection home. Our numbness. Our inability to be fully present in the one place where presence is most needed.

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I started writing fiction because I needed to go somewhere I couldn’t go in my professional life.

In fiction, you cannot manage your expression. The characters will not allow it. They insist on feeling things completely, on being contradictory and difficult and raw in ways that would be entirely inappropriate in a dental clinic. Writing them forced me to remember that I, too, had access to that register — that underneath all those years of professional surface acting, the person who felt things intensely and thought about them obsessively had not gone anywhere. She had simply been waiting, quietly, with the patience of someone who has learned that her time will come eventually.

When she came back — and she came back through writing, through the first stumbling pages of Afterlife, through Anna’s grief and her hunger and her slow, difficult return to herself — it was not a comfortable experience. Uncovering yourself after a long suppression is not joyful. It is disorienting. It is a little like coming out of a dark room into bright light: the first response is not relief, it is pain.

But on the other side of the pain is something I did not expect. Not happiness, exactly. Something better than happiness. Presence.

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I am not suggesting that we tear off our masks and weep publicly at our desks. That is not what I mean. The professional self is not a false self — it is a real part of who we are, and it matters.

What I am suggesting is this: that we find, somewhere in the architecture of our days, a space where the mask comes off. Not forever. Not even for long. But enough that the person underneath it can breathe, can be witnessed, can remember that they are more than the role they play between nine and six.

For me, that space is the page. For you, it might be something else entirely. The point is not the form. The point is the practice of returning to yourself — deliberately, regularly, before the distance between you and yourself becomes so vast that you have forgotten the way back.

Because the mask, worn long enough, stops feeling like a mask. It starts feeling like your actual face.

And that is the most dangerous moment. Not when you put it on. But when you forget you’re wearing it.