After the Performance

This text appears in Marginalia.

We are taught to believe that truth is something we speak into being. That it arrives through testimony, confession, or exposure. That nothing truly exists until it is named aloud and acknowledged by the right voice.

But many systems do not work that way.

Some systems are not interested in persuasion or performance. They do not argue, reassure, or respond to tone. They wait. They collect. They write things down. And at a certain point – often long after the human drama has exhausted itself – they proceed without asking for agreement.

There is a moment when a system stops asking whether something is true and begins deciding how it will be recorded.

This moment is rarely visible from the inside.

From within the story, it feels like stasis. Silence. Failure. The sense that nothing one has said or done has made any difference at all. There are no messages, no acknowledgements, no gestures of recognition. The absence of response is easy to misread as dismissal.

But often it marks something else entirely: the point at which truth no longer requires participation.

We tend to imagine accountability as spectacle. Exposure, confrontation, judgment. But some reckonings are quieter. They occur not in public collapse but in administrative rooms, in careful language, in documents that outlast the people who resisted them.

For those whose identity depends on voice – on assertion, reputation, or the ability to control how a story is told – this is where the real crisis begins.

An existential crisis is not fear. It is the realisation that there is no remaining move that preserves the self you have been defending.

If denial is maintained, the record grows heavier.

If admission is made, the identity collapses.

If silence is chosen, it no longer protects.

Every option destroys something essential.

What makes this unbearable is not punishment, but displacement. The sudden awareness that the world has continued, carefully and methodically, without waiting for consent. That something has been fixed in writing which can no longer be argued away, reframed, or re-performed.

Systems like this are not cruel. They are indifferent. They do not need villains. They do not need villains because they are not interested in character, only in pattern. What feels, from the inside, like persecution is often nothing more than the system declining to keep negotiating with a version of events it can no longer sustain.

This is not justice as spectacle. It is justice as archive. It does not shout. It does not accuse. It simply continues, carefully, after the performance has ended.

To be overtaken in this way is not to be defeated by an enemy. It is to be outlived by the truth.

And that, perhaps, is the quietest and most unsettling reckoning of all.

After the Performance

There comes a point
when the argument ends
not because it was answered
but because it was no longer needed.

Nothing announces this.
No voice interrupts.
No door closes.

The file grows heavier.
The room grows quieter.

You are still speaking
but the system
has begun to write.

You believed
that truth required your agreement,
that nothing counted
until you said it aloud.

But the record does not wait.
It accumulates.

What you called denial
it calls delay.
What you called defence
it calls pattern.

And one day
without ceremony
it moves on without you.

This is not punishment.
It is the moment
after performance.



This post is part of Kate Coldrick’s wider body of writing. More of her work can be found at katecoldrick.com