Performance or Presence

Written by: Liz Cerven

Dear Reader,

Someone recently asked me what I thought it meant to be professional. The question wasn’t posed directly—it came wrapped in commentary, in the familiar folds of appearance and assumption. It was about how one shows up, how one dresses, what one reveals or conceals.

And I’ve been turning it over ever since. Not just the question, but the weight of it. The way it so often isn’t about how we work—but how we appear while doing it.

Professionalism, I’m learning, is often code. A set of quiet agreements about what’s acceptable, respectable, palatable.

It whispers: Tone yourself down. Don’t be too loud, too tender, too queer, too angry, too visible.
It says: Tuck the self away.

It’s code for whiteness. For cisnormativity. For masculinity dressed in neutrality and passed off as “objective.” It’s code for uninked skin and hairstyles that don’t “distract.” For voices that don’t rise. For bodies that don’t insist. It’s a quiet surveillance that measures your worth by how little of your difference you dare to show.

As someone who walks into the room with stories already written on my skin—inked across my body—I know this code well. I’ve felt the moment eyes scan and pause, the quick mental calculation: Is she safe? Is she serious? Is she professional?

There’s a lyric by Nirvana that yells out here, sharp and familiar: “I’m not like them, but I can pretend.”
Some of us have built entire careers pretending—shaping ourselves into what’s acceptable, promotable, survivable. But the pretending hollows. And for many of us, the pretending was never convincing anyway.

What if our deepest professionalism is rooted in presence, not performance?
What if care is our competence?
What if clarity matters more than polish?
What if how we listen, how we witness, how we stay—is more essential than the image we project?

I think of how bell hooks wrote about love as an ethic—how justice lives not just in our ideas, but in our gestures, our rhythms, our boundaries.
And I think of how professionalism, as it’s often taught, makes so little room for contradiction, for softness, for rest. And yet, so many of us carry our labor in bodies that cannot—and will not—be streamlined.

For queer folks, for trans and gender-nonconforming folks, for Black and brown bodies, for disabled bodies, for anyone who doesn’t fit neatly into the box labeled appropriate, this code doesn’t just restrict expression—it demands erasure.

And sometimes, surviving that demand means folding parts of ourselves away to stay safe. Sometimes it means passing, withholding, shrinking. That’s real. That’s valid.

But I want to name what it costs us. What it takes to be legible to a system that was never built to hold us with care. What it means to silence the sacred ways we signal one another—through dress, through gesture, through tattoo, through language, through flare.

Because the truth is: many of us are professionals not in spite of our difference, our expressiveness, our identities—but because of them.
We’ve honed resilience.
We read rooms with our whole bodies.
We’ve cultivated care as survival, clarity as resistance, tenderness as precision.

So I’ve started reclaiming professionalism—not by rejecting it, but by redefining it.

For me, it’s not about being buttoned-up—it’s about being anchored.
Not about perfection—but presence.
Not about hiding my humanity—but showing up rooted in it.

Professionalism, as I live it now, allows space for transformation.
It holds the tattooed body and the soft voice, the sharp analysis and the tender pause.
It makes room for contradiction—for knowing when to speak with fire and when to sit in silence.
It lets me create with integrity, not just comply with expectation.

I no longer contort myself to appear “neutral.”
I let my truth speak—through my cadence, my clothes, the way I decorate my skin and my space.
There’s a professionalism in that—a deep one. One that honors authenticity as wisdom, not liability.

I’m reminded of something Jenny Odell wrote: “The point of doing nothing... isn’t to return to work refreshed and ready to be more productive, but rather to question what we currently perceive as productive at all.”
I think the same is true here.
Reclaiming professionalism isn’t about making space to play the old game with better tools. It’s about asking whether the game was ever meant for someone like me in the first place.

And the more I embrace this, the more I notice something shifting—in my work, in my relationships, in the communities I serve.
People soften. People open. People trust.
Because they can feel when someone is no longer performing a role, but living a practice.

This reclamation doesn’t mean it’s always easy.
There are still rooms that ask me to shrink.
Still moments where survival demands compromise.
But even then, I’m clearer on who I am—and what I will and won’t negotiate.

I believe we’re allowed to be whole.
Even in our workplaces. Especially there.
Because professionalism, at its best, isn’t about control—it’s about care.
And care—real care—asks for honesty, not hiding.

So, dear reader—
If you’ve ever been told you’re too much, too loud, too visible—
If you’ve been asked to shrink, to tone it down, to cover it up—
I see you.

And I wonder:
What might professionalism look like if it were shaped by you?

Not by inherited scripts or rigid expectations, but by the rhythm of your values, the texture of your truth, the way your presence makes a space more honest, more alive.

What would shift if you let your body be part of the work?
If you didn’t split your wisdom from your expression?
If you let care lead?

There’s no one way. No rulebook. No perfect model.
But there is permission—here, now—to define professionalism in a way that makes you more whole, not less.

Let it be creative.
Let it be imperfect.
Let it be yours.

So I’ve begun to ask myself:
What kind of professional do I want to be?
Who does my professionalism serve—and who does it silence?
What do I lose when I dress the part but abandon the pulse of what I know to be true?

I don’t have a clean conclusion. Only a quiet commitment:
To honor my becoming more than any role I’ve been assigned.
To choose presence over pretense.
To keep showing up—whole, if a little unruly.

And maybe that’s enough.
Maybe that’s what professionalism could become:
A practice of being human with integrity, even when the script says otherwise.

With devotion to the mess and the making