Deer in Headlines
By Gery Deer
Most of us spend our days performing. Not acting in the theatrical sense—no stage lights, no applause—but performing, nonetheless. We perform competence at work, patience in traffic, and happiness on social media. By the time evening rolls around, many of us deliver a full day’s worth of lines with little meaning.
Think about your own morning. You check email while eating breakfast. Are you tasting your coffee, or just swallowing it? That small moment may hold the difference between performing life and actually living it.
Performing is when you do something because the deadline is first thing tomorrow and someone expects a result. Presence is when you do something because you noticed something that refuses to leave you alone—like the barista who always draws a careful leaf in the foam even though almost nobody looks.
For most people, the gap is subtle. It’s the difference between doing the thing and the thing having you. You can move through an entire day answering emails, making small talk, nodding in meetings, checking boxes—and never actually be there.
Presence sneaks up on you differently. It’s the moment you stop mid-sentence because you heard a bird outside and realize you haven’t listened to anything but noise all week. It’s noticing the weight of a conversation instead of rehearsing your reply while the other person is still talking.
Social media has turned performance into a sickening staple. We curate our moods, polish our opinions, crop the messy edges out of real life until what we share is more like the reflection of ourselves in a funhouse mirror. The result is a strange pressure to appear more together, more informed, more inspired than we actually feel.
There is a place for performance. Teachers perform to hold the attention of their students. Leaders perform to steady a room. Writers, speakers, even columnists perform a little to shape chaos into something readable.
But performance was never meant to replace presence. When the show never ends, we start losing small human signals: the pause before someone tells the truth, the tired look behind a joke, the quiet satisfaction of finishing something that mattered.
The cost of such nonstop performance is exhaustion. Not the dramatic burnout people post about online, but the quieter fatigue that comes from always being slightly on stage. You measure your reactions, edit your sentences, and move through the day as if someone might be evaluating you.
Presence, by contrast, is disarmingly simple. It begins with that moment when you realize you’re just running the script. But you can change that.
Maybe slow down long enough to taste the coffee or look up when someone speaks instead of nodding while staring mindlessly phone. Maybe step outside and notice the weather or the graffiti on the bakery wall.
None of this will make you more impressive, build a personal brand or make a post go viral. What it might do is return you to your own life.
Presence can steady people. It lowers the noise enough to notice what actually needs your attention—a hard conversation, a good idea, a tired friend, a quiet, ordinary moment that would otherwise pass unnoticed.
And strangely, the more present you become, the less life feels like something you have to manage. Problems are still there, deadlines still exist, but being human was never supposed to be a full-time performance.
It was supposed to be lived in small attentive pieces: a conversation where you are fully engaged, a walk where you notice the season changing, a calm moment where your mind is not rehearsing tomorrow.
The challenge is not abandoning performance entirely. Sometimes the job requires it. Sometimes some of your day requires polish and composure.
The real trick is remembering to step off the stage when the moment passes. Look up from the script. Listen for the bird outside the window. Taste the coffee while it is still warm.
Because the goal was never to perform your way through life. The goal is to actually be there while it happens. And if you catch yourself mid-performance today, that pause might be the most honest moment of the day. Stay for it even if nothing else changes.
The Jamestown Comet 
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Only at this table.
In Opinion, Uncategorized on March 6, 2026 at 11:20 pmDeer In Headlines
By Gery Deer
It was late evening at a hotel restaurant in Washington, D.C. Most of the restaurant crowd were either deep in their own discussions or had eyes glued to televisions broadcasting college basketball. And there we were. A handful of adults who were born with or a parent of someone with bladder exstrophy, all of us in town as patient advocates preparing to take on Congress.
We laughed and talked, as burgers, salads and something fried occupied most of the real estate between us. Someone had to move a basket of fries so we could make room for desserts and more drinks.
On the surface, we didn’t look so different from anyone else in the room. Just another group decompressing after a long day. But the conversation? That could have only happened there. Only at this table.
Bladder exstrophy is rare – very rare. So, when you’re born with a condition that requires extensive surgery – or surgeries – and lifelong management, there are very few who can relate. Explaining it often brings sighs of pity, confused expressions, and a host of questions.
At this table, there was none of that. We didn’t have to define the anatomy. We didn’t have to summarize childhood surgical histories or explain why insurance preauthorization feels less like paperwork and more like gladiator combat. We could start mid-story.
We compared hospital experiences the way other people compare hometowns. We talked about the benefits and challenges of living with something so unusual it was often hard to explain, even to those closest to us.
That shared experience can lead to its own sort of verbal shorthand. It strips away the introductory chapter and drops you straight into the middle of the book. And shared experiences from birth? There’s no need to tiptoe around things, perform bravery or package vulnerability in tidy language. You can be direct. You can be specific. You can be understood.
There was a moment — and I won’t detail it, because some conversations belong only to those who were present — when the tone softened. Someone shared a memory from adolescence, a time when feeling different felt especially sharp. No one rushed to fix it. No one offered a motivational poster response. Instead, there was safety in letting go, in the expression of feelings and thoughts that only others like us could understand.
It manifests as a shared laugh, or a look, or a nod. It’s not dramatic. It doesn’t require a spotlight. It’s a quiet acknowledgment that says, “Yeah, I know.”
Every community has a version of this table. Veterans find it with other veterans. Cancer survivors with survivors. Parents of children with complex needs with others who speak that language fluently. I experience it whenever I talk to those who have cared for elderly parents. Even journalists have our own version — around a busy lunch counter or late dinner table, arguing about headlines.
The table isn’t about exclusivity. It’s about the rare and deeply emotional relief of not having to translate your life for someone else, and timing matters.
We weren’t children navigating surgeries for the first time. We were adults who had built careers, relationships and resilience. We had come to Washington to advocate, to push for better systems. That context shaped the conversation.
We were recounting the past, but also connecting it to the future. Even more incredible to me was the fact that the congenital flaw that made us the objects of both fascination and ridicule as children was now quite literally our superpower. It was what brought us to Capitol Hill to help others – because we can.
When we finally stood up, games still flickering on the screens and the crowd still rumbling, I looked at that table and felt the weight of its ordinariness. It was just wood and silverware and a stack of dishes.
But for a couple of hours one evening, amid basketball fans and bar noise, it was something far more. It was a place where five people shared something unique to them – an understanding. No, it was more than that. It was something as rare as the condition that we shared, but as unique as each one of us. But only at this table.