The Disco Ball
Identity, the observer self, and why showing different faces to different people isn’t fake or phony, it’s survival.
There’s a question people often ask when they first meet someone.
Seven or eight times out of ten, it’s the same one.
You’re at a party. Might be a family thing where there are new people. You shake someone’s hand to meet them. They smile and they say:
So, what do you do?
Not who are you?
What do you do?
And I want you to sit with that for a minute.
Because that question isn’t neutral.
It’s not curiosity.
It’s judgment.
It comes from somewhere deep in the subconscious.
That “little filing clerk in your brain” who needs to know where to categorize this new person they’re seeing into their subconscious hierarchy of people.
Subconsciously the ego has to judge and take measure of someone or something new.
Is this person safe? How much can I reveal?
Otherwise, it doesn’t know what to show them to stay safe.
So…
What shelf do they go on?What do they do for work?
What company do they work for?
What are they worth? Net worth?
What value, if any, do they have for me?
What kind of car do they drive?
Do they have a second home?
Do they live in the nice neighborhood?
Who are you?
It comes from a place of curiosity.
What do you do?
It comes from a place of judgment.
And for most of my life, I had answers when I needed them.
Father, husband, designer, coach, tech support, artist, dart player, or nothing.
I could hand people a neat little stack of identity cards and let them sort me.
But that question, the right one, the harder one… I couldn’t answer that at all.
Who are you?
I’m still working on it, and below is some of what I’ve figured out so far.
What’s Behind the Eyeballs?
Strip everything away.
The job title.
The relationships.
The roles.
The labels people put on you and the ones you put on yourself.
Who is left?
I’ll tell you who’s left: the observer.
The consciousness that lights up behind the eyeballs every morning.
That observer.
That witness.
The part that can watch your ego throw a tantrum.
Watch your brain get hijacked by a trigger.
Watch yourself make a decision you know you’ll regret, and just... observe it.
Don’t judge it.
Not fight it.
Just see it.
That observer is the who.
Not your hobbies.
Not your résumé.
Not the names other people call you.
The observer.
The witness.
The being, presence, and consciousness underneath all the performance.
The ego is the part that says “me and mine“ and “I need” and “they did this to me.”
The ego constructs identity out of roles and gets genuinely devastated when those roles are challenged, questioned, or disappear entirely.
And they do disappear.
Roles always do.
Nothing lasts forever.
The ego wasn’t built for that bullshit.
The observer just watches.
And keeps watching.
Through all of it.
I’ve spent more than five years learning to live from a place that is free of ego.
Free of an agenda.
Free of a desired outcome.
Free from attention-hijacking.
Free from societally conditioned judgment.
Free from the unnecessary suffering of my unmet needs.
Free from the unwarranted suffering of my unmet wants.
I’m not done.
I’m not sure anyone ever finishes this project.
It’s part of life, part of the program, part of the matrix.
And I can tell you the difference between the two.
Between living from the ego and living from the observer.
That space is the difference between being controlled by everything outside you and being grounded in something nothing can touch.
Enter: The Disco Ball
This is a metaphor I keep coming back to, because it’s the most honest one I’ve found.
I am a disco ball.
You are a disco ball.
Every human is their own unique disco ball.
Because why not?
Disco balls mean dancing, and that is fun and full of joy.
It’s not a “Disco Ball” in the look at me, center of attention way.
It’s in the multifaceted, showing different mirrors to different people way.
Think about how a disco ball actually works.
It’s one object.
One continuous surface. But depending on where you’re standing, you see different panels of it.
Different light. Different angles.
And the people on the other side of the room?
They’re seeing something different than you are.
That’s me with people.
The same thing.
Every group I’m part of, every combination of human beings in a room, gets a different set of my mirrors shown to them.
Some facets are warm and open.
Some are quiet and observational.
Some are strategic.
Some are funny.
Some are deeply philosophical at midnight.
Some are completely closed off, giving nothing, conserving everything.
Some are invisible and can leave a room without being noticed.
And before you get it twisted: that’s not fake.
It’s not manipulation. It’s not lying.
And it’s not two-faced or conceited.
It’s learned survival.
📌 Real Talk
Showing different parts of yourself to different people isn’t a character flaw. It’s sophisticated social intelligence.
Every emotionally aware human does this.
The problem only starts when you forget which facets are real or when you only ever show the ones that protect you and never the ones that need light.
The Equipment I Was Born With.
Here’s the thing about me and the disco ball… I didn’t build it on purpose.
I was born with very sensitive equipment and no instruction manuals, and life taught me how to use them by circumstance.
I came into this world with what one might call high-fidelity sensors and antennas.
INFJ, metacognitive, trauma-born empath.
I feel your suffering and see your perspective easily.
I plan far in advance for any and all possible outcomes.
I preprocess emotions of loss or fear so they’re not an issue should they show up.
Whatever framework you want to use, the result is the same:
I receive everything.
I’m picking up a signal from across the room.
Shifts in energy.
Subtle tension between people who are pretending everything’s fine.
The discomfort on display by a handful.
The weight behind a word that someone said too quickly.
Most people get white noise.
I get 8K, Dolby Surround, omnidirectional, infrared, and x-ray.
And the empathy?
It’s not just emotional.
It’s physical.
When I walk into a room, I feel the energy in it.
Not in some woo-woo, crystals-and-incense way.
I mean a genuine somatic response.
Hairs on the back of the neck. Stomach dropping.
Something tightening in the chest. The body picks it up before the brain even processes it. I’m reading the room with my senses and body before I’ve said a word.
I was born a sensitive kid with all my sensors wide open.
And from the start and for a long time, people kept “bumping into them.”
Screaming into the microphone, basically. That throws things off. It just does. My body learned to turn the sensitivity down — not off, but down, WAY down. Because fully open was too much in order to survive.
My sensors have slowly been recalibrating and healing.
📌 If You Recognize This
If you’re wired like this. If you’ve always felt like you’re receiving more than other people, if you’ve been told you’re “too sensitive” or “too intense,” it’s not a defect.
You were built this way for a reason.
The sensitivity isn’t the problem.
The problem is that no one handed you an instruction manual for it.
Why the Facets Exist
Let me tell you where the disco ball actually came from.
It wasn’t a design decision.
It was a coping mechanism to survive psychologically.
When I was young, there was no safe space to be fully myself, free of judgment, where love felt something other than transactional.
No room where you could fall apart and have someone catch you or hold space for you.
No place to just feel whatever you were feeling without someone making you regret it.
You learn fast; you show people what they can handle.
You show them what keeps the peace.
You rotate the disco ball.
Stop it right now, or I’ll give you a real reason to cry.
That’s the origin story of my disco ball.
Learning to give people the version of me that wouldn’t get me in trouble.
That wouldn’t invite punishment.
That wouldn’t make the situation worse.
That was to be seen and not heard.
The facets started as protection.
Then I became fluent, then a master, then a Jedi.
So when people meet me and they get one version of me:
The calm, measured, thoughtful one;
or the sharp and funny one;
or the quiet one in the corner who’s taking in everything…
They’re not getting a fake.
They’re getting the mirror I’ve determined is safest to show them right now.
Based on information they don’t even know I’m collecting in real time.
That’s not dishonesty.
That’s calibration.
The question, the one I’m still sitting with, is this:
Which facets am I hiding that deserve to be seen?
The Cost of Always Scanning
Here’s what I won’t sugarcoat.
Living this way is goddamn exhausting.
The high-fidelity reception NEVER turns off.
I’m reading rooms I didn’t even choose to enter.
I’m pre-calculating outcomes in conversations before they’ve started.
I’m running scenarios.
What they might say, what I’ll say back, what that might mean, and how to position myself before any of it actually happens.
It’s a chess game I never agreed to play.It started the moment I was born.
And I’ve been playing it mostly alone.
The cost is this: you lose track of yourself.
You get so good at showing people what they need to see that one day you’re standing in the middle of your own life and you genuinely cannot remember which facets are the real ones.
No particular collection of mirrors can answer “who are you?”
You’ve been so many different mirrors for so many different people that the question, Who are you, actually? starts to feel like a trick question.
That’s not depression, exactly.
It’s something quieter than that.
More fundamental.
It’s the feeling of possessing very sophisticated instrumentation that nobody ever told you about or taught you how to handle properly.
You are born, and it’s on.
📌 A Grounding Practice That Actually Works
Sit on actual earth. Dirt. Grass.
Something connected to the ground, not carpet, not a wooden floor, or not pavement. Let your skin touch it.
Your body touching the earth releases the static electricity you’ve been carrying.
All the ambient charge that builds up from constant scanning and reading and calibrating discharges.
This isn’t a metaphor.
It’s physics. Try it.
The Observer Doesn’t Need a Role
The ego panics when the roles disappear.
When there is nothing for it to do, pay attention to, or worry about.
Because the ego is the role.
Strip those away, and the ego is standing there in its underwear.
The observer doesn’t panic.
The observer just watches.
Says: Okay. That’s gone. What’s here now?
That’s the distinction I’ve been working toward my entire life and only started actually living in the last couple of years.
The observer doesn’t need to be a father or a coach or a designer to know it exists.
It exists underneath all of that, independent of all of that, unaffected by the loss of any of that.
The disco ball spins.
The facets catch light and scatter it everywhere.
But the ball itself, the core, doesn’t move.
That’s the part I know now.
Some of it is intimate, some of it is fresh.
I feel there are things I’ve yet to tap into in ways never experienced.
It all feels much bigger than me, too.
Something is shifting on a deeper level.
The sensors are still running.
The ball is still spinning.
And I’m starting to understand the difference.
Between the mirror and the light.
Until next time…
Be well.
Bert 🙏
Barely, But Here.
Raw, first-person writing about stuff people survive but rarely say out loud. If this sharing landed for you, pass it to someone who needs it.
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The question I'm still sitting with is: Which facets am I hiding that deserve to be seen?
If you're wired like this, I want to hear how it shows up for you.
Drop it below.