Purpose vs. Performance

Wanting to show up without putting on a show

“Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”

Mary Oliver

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to show up.

When I started dreaming up The Wellery, I would say, “I want to be the person I needed 5 years ago.”

My goal was to be the kind of support I needed when I was really going through it. The kind I searched for but couldn’t find. I wanted to offer understanding, compassion, and grounded guidance for people navigating complex health challenges or simply the overwhelm of trying to live a “healthy” life.

That intention still lives at the center of what I do. But if I’m honest, there’s a part of me that still hesitates…especially when it comes to sharing online.

I experience an ongoing push and pull between sharing with purpose and sharing as performance. Between wanting to be of service and wanting to protect what feels sacred. Between sharing my true experience and what I think might “land”.

I know how I don’t want to show up: overly-performative, polished, or prescriptive. I never want my relationship to social media to evolve into performative living — losing moments of presence to the pressure to post.

My health and wellness are sacred to me… not just content.

But I also know there’s a middle ground.

Sometimes I forget that the small things I do daily to feel good might be “normal” to me, but could be really helpful or inspiring for someone else.

The knowledge I’ve gathered through education and lived experience might be exactly what someone else needs to hear.

The mindset shifts that have changed my life might help someone else get curious about how they relate to illness, wellness, healing, control, and trust.

The habits. The realistic tips. The wisdom. The learning. The remembering. The perspective shifts. The messy in-between.

I do have something to share, and I’m slowly learning that it’s possible to do that with authenticity…and without losing the sacredness of it all.

You might argue: “It’s not that deep.”
(But as a highly sensitive, Pisces sun, Cancer moon…it feels deep)

I’m also a recovering perfectionist — someone who spent years trying to control for as many outcomes as possible.

And for a long time, social media has felt like another thing to control. Which, of course, makes me want to avoid it altogether.

I don’t want it to be another subject of my hypervigilance.

Because I know that there is a potential for lightness here. For humanness. A space for authenticity, connection, resonance, and also unfiltered joy, whimsy, and fun.

I can be intentional and authentic…and it doesn’t have to feel so heavy.

It’s been interesting (and honestly, humbling) to have my lived experience so intertwined with the brand I’m building. I enjoy the world-building of The Wellery — the mission, the imagery, the storytelling. But, the truth is, sometimes it can feel at odds with the reality of my nonlinear, very human healing process.

I’m learning that there is space for both. For structure and spontaneity. For planning and humanity.

Because when I try to control it — when I overthink what to post or how it will be perceived — it turns into another thing I avoid altogether. Another place where uncertainty feels unsafe.

And the thing is… I can trust my community to practice discernment — to take what resonates and leave what doesn’t. To engage with what I share the same way I encourage my clients to engage with their healing: with curiosity, not comparison.

We all live somewhere in the “figuring it out” — in the contradictions, the in-between, the becoming — and maybe that’s exactly where I’m meant to share from.

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet