I masked at work for years. Then the mask cracked.

For years I had two jobs. The one on my contract, and the full-time performance of being a normal professional.

The second job had no title and no pay. It was tracking every face in every meeting, scripting small talk, and sitting on my hands so I would not fidget through another hour.

If you have never done it, it is hard to explain how much processing power the performance eats. You are running two programs at once, all day, every day.

Nobody saw the second job, so nobody understood why I was so tired. By 6pm I had nothing left, and by Friday I was a husk with a weekend of recovery masquerading as a life.

• Evenings: gone to recovery, not to living.
• Weekends: refueling for the next performance.
• Vacations: the only weeks I felt like a person.

Masking was not free. It was just invoiced to a different account.

It broke on an ordinary Wednesday. A meeting ran long, a colleague made a harmless joke about my "focus face," and I felt the whole apparatus slip: the smile, the posture, the script, like a fuse blowing.

I spent twenty minutes in a stairwell doing breathing exercises I did not believe in. The mask did not fall off. It cracked, and I could not un-crack it.

Nothing dramatic happened next, which is its own kind of dramatic. I went back to my desk, answered emails, and understood I could not keep the apparatus running anymore.

I want to be honest here: I still mask, because rent and manners exist. What changed is the size of the performance.

• I tell some colleagues I focus better with headphones and odd hours.
• I stopped pretending that meetings energize me.
• I budget masking like money: spent on purpose, never by default.

Some days the old mask still goes on automatically, out of pure habit. The difference is that I notice now, and noticing gives me a choice.

The goal was never no mask. The goal is a mask light enough that there is still a life underneath it.