The Mask Will Cost You More Than the Mess Ever Did
A meditation on worth, performance, and where the universe actually reads from
There’s a parable I keep coming back to.
It comes from a lesson my mentor used to share that quietly rewired how I think about power, integrity, and the games we play to look good while slowly dying inside.
The parable is about a prostitute and a preacher.
And if that combination makes you uncomfortable, good. Stay with me.
The Setup
There’s a woman. Society decided what she was before she ever opened her mouth.
She’s made choices she never imagined she’d have to make. Survived things she shouldn’t have had to survive. Worked jobs that come with judgment baked in. Her life, from the outside, looks like a cautionary tale — the kind people reference when they want to feel better about their own decisions.
But here’s what nobody sees:
Every night, in the quiet, she prays. Not performatively. Not for an audience. She prays because she genuinely wishes she could live a different life. She wishes she could bring something good into the world. She wishes she could become something more than what her circumstances have made her.
Her heart is bruised as hell.
But it never hardened.
She still believes in her own becoming.
Now, across town, there’s a preacher.
He’s the golden boy. The community celebrates him. He’s got the platform, the title, the applause. When he walks into a room, people feel safer. He looks like righteousness walking.
But inside?
Pride. Fear. Judgment. Vanity. An insatiable hunger for admiration that he’s learned to dress up as ministry.
His goodness isn’t something he lives — it’s a costume he puts on for the congregation and takes off the moment he’s alone.
He wants to look holy.
He has no interest in being holy.
The Punchline Nobody Wants to Hear
Here’s where the parable gets uncomfortable:
The universe — God, the divine, karma, the field, whatever framework you prefer — sees the prostitute’s heart as clean.
And the preacher’s as stained.
Let that land.
The woman everyone condemned? Her heart stayed soft. Her intention stayed sincere. Her longing for goodness was real, even when her circumstances couldn’t yet match it.
The man everyone celebrated? His heart calcified under the weight of his own performance. His goodness was a transaction — admiration in, virtue signaling out.
One lived a flawed life with a pure heart.
The other lived a socially approved life with a corrupt one.
And the universe knew the difference.
Why This Story Hits Different for High Performers
I’ve spent over fifteen years in rooms with the most ambitious, driven, successful people you can imagine. Founders. CEOs. Creators building empires. People who’ve generated hundreds of millions in revenue and built brands that millions of people follow.
And you know what I’ve learned?
Almost all of them are secretly terrified they’re not good enough.
They’re afraid their past disqualifies them. That the mess — the divorce, the failure, the addiction, the choices made in survival mode — somehow cancels out their right to be powerful, whole, or worthy.
They’ve internalized the lie that you have to be spotless to be valuable.
And so they perform.
They build identities around looking good instead of being good. They curate. They polish. They optimize their image while their actual self slowly suffocates under the weight of the mask.
The preacher strategy.
But here’s what the prostitute in the parable understood that the preacher never did:
Your circumstances do not dictate your purity. Your intention does.
Goodness isn’t measured by how clean your life looks from the outside.
It’s measured by the sincerity of what’s happening on the inside — in the quiet moments when no one’s watching, when there’s no audience to perform for, when it’s just you and the truth of who you’re trying to become.
The universe doesn’t read your LinkedIn bio.
It reads your heart.
The Geometry of This
In the work I’ve been developing around what I call The Geometry of Energy, there’s a concept that applies here: congruence.
Congruence isn’t about perfection. It’s about alignment.
It’s about the gap — or lack of gap — between who you are on the inside and who you’re presenting on the outside.
The prostitute in the parable? Her energy was congruent.
Her external struggle matched her internal sincerity. There was no gap between who she was and who she was trying to become — she owned all of it. The mess, the longing, the prayer, the hope. It was all integrated. All honest.
The preacher? His energy was fractured.
His external image contradicted his internal reality. He looked one way and lived another. And that [[[[gap]]]] — between performance and truth — is where spiritual decay lives.
The mask will always cost you more than the mess ever did.
Because the mess is just circumstance. It’s just where you are on the map.
But the mask? The mask is a choice. A daily decision to fracture yourself, to trade authenticity for applause, to let the performance slowly eat you alive.
You can recover from a mess.
It’s much harder to recover from decades of pretending.
Both Roles Live Inside Us
Here’s the part that requires some honesty:
Most of us have been both people in this story.
We’ve been the judged. The misunderstood. The one carrying choices we never wanted to make while the world decided we were damaged goods.
And we’ve been the performer. The one who learned to wear the mask so well we forgot it wasn’t our face. The one who got really good at looking like we had it together while something inside was slowly dying.
That’s not hypocrisy.
That’s just the human experience.
The question isn’t whether you’ve played both roles — you have, we all have.
The question is: which one are you choosing now?
The Lie This Story Burns to the Ground
The lie is that you need to be spotless to be worthy.
That your past disqualifies you from your power.
That messy humanity cancels out your capacity for goodness, leadership, impact, love.
Bullshit.
The Heart of Gold — the real one, the one the universe actually recognizes — belongs to the person who:
Wishes to do good even when their circumstances aren’t perfect
Is honest about their struggles and keeps moving anyway
Refuses to weaponize morality against others
Chooses authenticity over applause
Has humility instead of ego
Stays sincere even when life is a goddamn mess
Your heart — honest, hopeful, unmuted — is already gold.
Not will be gold when you fix yourself. Not might become gold if you finally get your shit together.
Is gold. Right now. In the mess. While you’re still becoming.
A Warning for the Performers
And for those still wearing the costume?
For those collecting accolades for goodness they’re not actually living?
This is your warning shot. [pew pew 🌩️🔫]
Fake virtue is still deception. The universe doesn’t grade on a curve, and it doesn’t care about your branding. You can fool the room — the followers, the clients, the community — but you cannot fool the field.
No amount of frameworks, five-figure masterminds, thought leadership content, or perfectly curated posts will wash it clean.
The performance might buy you applause.
But it will cost you your soul.
And somewhere, in the quiet moments you try not to think about, you already know this.
The Invitation
So here’s what I want to leave you with:
Stop performing. Start being.
Let them see the mess.
Let them hear the real story — not the polished version, but the honest one. The one that includes the failures, the stumbles, the prayers whispered at 2am when no one was watching.
Let your heart stay soft even when life tries to harden it.
That’s not weakness. That’s the deepest kind of strength there is.
The world will label you before it listens to you. Let it. Your job isn’t to manage their perception — your job is to stay true to the gold that’s already inside you.
The prostitute understood this.
The preacher never did.
And the universe — patient, impartial, always watching — knew exactly who was who.
Your worth is not in what you’ve done.
Your worth is in who you are becoming.
And the mask will always cost you more than the mess ever did.
Remember that.
— Tn9
P.S. If this landed, you’re probably my people. I write about the intersection of power, healing, and becoming — for humans who are done performing and ready to lead from truth. Subscribe and I’ll meet you in your inbox.