What happens when you stop being the version of yourself that everyone loved — and realize you never fully inhabited it?

This episode unfolds the psychic aftermath of chronic likability: the internal spinning that begins once the performance dissolves. Framed by trauma, ADHD, and the deep structures of people-pleasing, the essay refuses clarity in favor of recursive presence. Through unspoken friction, memory collapse, and epistemic silence, we trace a self that never arrives — but remains. It is not healing. It is residence.

Inspired by thinkers like Lauren Berlant, Byung-Chul Han, and Judith Butler, this episode offers no advice, no redemption. Just motion. Thought in the form of atmosphere.

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Bibliography 

Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society. Translated by Erik Butler. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015.

Lispector, Clarice. The Hour of the Star. Translated by Benjamin Moser. New York: New Directions, 2011.

Simondon, Gilbert. Individuation in the Light of Notions of Form and Information. Translated by Taylor Adkins. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2008.