Onlyness and Living More Authentically
Author’s Note: This is the fourth in a series about onlyness — the belief that what we’re carrying is uniquely ours, when in fact it’s carried by a lot of other men. Each piece follows one man and the question he’s been living without knowing it was a question. This one is about performance — and what a man finds when he finally stops.
Ellis was known by everyone and by no one.
He learned early that love was earned through performance. So he became a performer. Not consciously. Not cynically. It just happened. Like many boys, he learned which version of himself would get the response he needed and showed up as that version.
He was an athlete who hated his sport — competing for years at an elite level in something that never felt like his. He was a straight-A student not because learning thrilled him but because excellence was the price of love in the house he grew up in. He was a faithful member of his church community for decades — not because he never doubted but because doubt wasn’t in the approved script.
The boy whose real preferences were beside the point filed those preferences away. He filed the doubt away. And over time the performance became so practiced, so complete, that it stopped feeling like a performance. It just felt like who he was supposed to be.
Except it wasn’t. And somewhere inside he knew it.
He became a community builder — genuinely good at it, genuinely caring, the kind of man people came to when they needed someone to hold space and ask the right questions. For years he and his wife hosted open dinner tables for strangers. He worked alongside people experiencing homelessness, learning their names, learning what drove them there. He eventually moved into a pastoral role, helping people connect with each other and with something larger than themselves.
The work was real. The care was real.
And yet it felt like he was watching himself do it instead of truly being a part of it.
I’ve heard this from a lot of men. They’re present. They’re doing the right things. They’re at the dinner table, in the meeting, in the conversation. And simultaneously they’re watching themselves be there. Not fully inside it. Observing their life rather than living it.
I know something about this from my own life. The specific shape was different from Ellis’s — but the same early lesson. That the real version of myself required protection. That carrying something alone felt safer than asking someone to carry it with me. Most men I’ve talked to know some version of that lesson. We just learned it in different rooms.
I’ve learned that what produces the detachment is this: when the version of ourselves that’s in the room isn’t entirely us, we can’t be entirely in the room. The performer shows up. The real person watches from somewhere inside our heads.
Known by everyone and by no one.
For a long time Ellis carried something privately that didn’t fit into his performed life. He carried it through all the showing up — the dinners, the community building, the pastoral work, the street outreach. He carried it alone, convinced that if the real version of himself became visible, the life he’d built would come apart.
He was right about that last part.
When he finally named it — to his wife, to himself, to the world — the life he’d built largely fell away. Relationships that couldn’t survive the real him revealed themselves as relationships with the performance. The community he’d spent years building contracted dramatically. The structures that had shaped the performance lost their hold.
What remained was smaller. And for the first time, solid.
“Honesty has become my primary value and the litmus test for everything I say and do,” he said. “And it has brought so much freedom into my life.”
Not ease. Not comfort. Freedom. He’s clear about the distinction.
I’ve spoken with Ellis several times. Recently, I spoke with him when he was in Europe, building a coaching practice helping men do what he’d spent decades not doing. Naming their parts. Facing their fears. Addressing the pain underneath the performance.
What struck me was something he probably didn’t intend to show.
The life he’s living now is the life of the boy he filed away.
The curious one. The one who wanted to explore and learn and help people — not perform for them. The one whose real preferences were beside the point for so long that he almost forgot he had them. He and his wife are doing the hard work of rebuilding in a new country, far from the structures that shaped the performance, far from the families and communities that knew the performed version of him. Their kids are in schools with children from everywhere. Their lives are already broader than his childhood allowed.
He didn’t just stop performing. He started becoming the person he actually was.
“I truly believe I’m becoming a healthier father, friend, and coach through the process.”
He said it from the middle of the hardest season of his life. From a marriage that isn’t what it was and may become something else entirely.
And somehow from a place that feels, for the first time, like solid ground.
Most men never go where Ellis went. Not because they’re stronger or weaker. Because the experience of onlyness holds them back. Because the cost of being open looks too high from the outside. Because the life built on top of the performance looks too good to risk.
Ellis knows that math. He ran it for a long time.
What he couldn’t calculate from inside the performance was what was on the other side of it. The freedom that arrives not when everything is fine, but when everything is finally true.
The relief — not comfortable, not easy, sometimes devastating — of no longer watching himself live his life.
Of finally being in the room.
Ellis puts it this way in his work with men: we can either transform our pain or transmit it.
He chose transformation. Later than he would have liked. At a cost he’s still paying and a freedom he’s still exploring.
And he’s not the only one who needed to.
"... we can either transform our pain or transmit it."
As a coach, I struggle with this word, transformation. Many coaches talk about it. I'm never quite sure if any of us is talking about the same thing. The word arrives in my system, freighted, to say the least.
But this claim feels real. In my own work with men, and that is where I live, I find this true as well.