Poems for Letting Go of the Need to Perform
You come home from a day of being seen and the face is tired before the rest of you. There was an audience all day — at the desk, in the meeting, in the hallway — and you gave each one the version they needed: agreeable, easy, good. The smile held a beat too long. The yes came out before you’d checked. These are six short poems about people pleasing and the quiet work of setting the performance down — not a method for saying no, not a script to fix yourself with, just a few quiet lines for the moment the curtain finally closes and the room is empty. Read one. There is no one here to read them for.
Six poems about people pleasing
One — The Audience That Isn’t There
You are still performing
for a room that emptied hours ago.
The lights are off. The seats are gone.
You can stop now.
There is no one left to please
but the one who came home tired.
Two — The Smile Held Too Long
Your face did a full day’s work
holding a shape it didn’t feel.
Let it down now.
Let it be plain, or tired, or nothing.
A face at rest
is not a face that failed.
Three — The Version You Supply
Each person got the you they wanted —
the easy one, the helpful one,
the one who never makes it heavy.
There is another one here too,
the one you don’t hand out,
and that one gets to rest tonight.
Four — The Yes That Wasn’t Yours
It came out fast, before you’d asked yourself,
the way it always does.
You don’t have to keep every one
you gave away today.
And the next time the question comes,
the pause is allowed to be yours.
Five — Nothing to Prove in This Room
No one is grading the evening.
No one is keeping the score
you carry around all day.
In here it is just you
and the lamp and the quiet,
and none of it needs earning.
Six — Liked Was Never the Rent
You learned that being good
was how you got to stay.
But the chair holds you the same
whether or not you pleased a single soul.
You do not have to be liked
to be allowed to be here.
A short reflection
There is no order to read these in, and no number you have to reach. One short poem, read slowly in a room with no audience, can give the tired face something to do besides hold its shape. The pull to perform doesn’t switch off because a day ended, and these lines won’t switch it off either. But they will sit with you in the quiet after, where there is no one to be good for. If tomorrow asks for the performance again, the page is still here for when you get home.
Most of the performing is not vanity; it is maintenance — the small, constant work of keeping other people comfortable, done so automatically that it stops registering as work at all. That is why it tires you in a way the day’s actual tasks do not. There is more of this in the Journal, written for other evenings that end the same way.
If you would like a few of these to keep, the free reading is here — short poems and a five-minute audio reading in one calm voice, for the next evening the curtain finally closes. And if the need to be liked is one you have been carrying a long time, Nothing Needs to Be Proved holds more, read aloud the same way.
A note from the Library: these poems are short on purpose. They are meant to be returned to, not finished. — Zen Roots, published by Ledgerstone Press.