Identity Fragmentation & Burnout: The Mental Health Cost of Performing Every Role

What one artist's photographs reveal about identity fragmentation, the pressure to be everything to everyone, and the mental health cost of living in costume.

AI-generated image in the style of Cindy Sherman.

Between 1977 and 1980, photographer Cindy Sherman created seventy black-and-white images that would become some of the most influential artwork of the twentieth century. In each photograph, Sherman appears as a different woman: the anxious city girl, the frustrated housewife, the glamorous bombshell, the vulnerable ingenue. She is all of them and none of them. The images look like promotional stills from 1950s films, but the movies they advertise never existed.  

What Sherman captured was not cinema but something more urgent - the psychological reality of women who spend their lives performing roles that culture assigns them. For women today, navigating pressure to be the perfect professional, partner, mother, daughter, and friend while curating a flawless social media presence, Sherman's work offers a mirror. The exhaustion you feel is real. The fragmentation is not your fault. And the cost of performing every role is your authentic self.

The City Girl: Performing Competence While Feeling Vulnerable

View Untitled Film Still #21 at MoMA

In one of Sherman's most famous images, she stands on a city street in a tailored suit and beret, clutching her purse, looking over her shoulder with an expression that mingles confidence and anxiety. She could be on her way to an important meeting or fleeing something threatening. The ambiguity is the point.

This is the working woman as cultural fantasy - polished, professional, navigating urban life with apparent ease. But look closer at her face. The tension around her eyes suggests vigilance rather than confidence. She is performing competence while internally calculating risk, reading situations, staying alert.

How many women recognize this double consciousness? You walk into the office projecting authority while your internal monologue questions whether you belong there. You navigate public spaces monitoring for threats while appearing unbothered. You perform confidence because showing vulnerability feels dangerous, yet the performance itself is exhausting.

Research on imposter syndrome shows that high-achieving women often feel like frauds despite objective success. The internal experience - doubt, anxiety, fear of exposure - exists completely at odds with the external performance. This gap between inner reality and outer presentation predicts burnout, anxiety disorders, and depression. Sherman's city girl captures this split perfectly: she looks like she has it together, but something in her expression suggests the effort required to maintain that appearance.

The Housewife: Domestic Performance and Identity Erasure

View Untitled Film Still #35 at MoMA

In another image, Sherman appears as a frustrated housewife, shot from a low angle that emphasizes her dramatic, off-screen glance. She wears an apron and embodies the domestic woman of 1950s cinema - think Sophia Loren in a kitchen melodrama. But her expression suggests someone trapped, looking beyond the frame toward something she cannot reach.

The housewife role is perhaps the most psychologically complex performance culture demands. You are expected to create a beautiful home, raise well-adjusted children, maintain harmony, and do it all with grace and apparent ease. The labor is invisible - emotional, domestic, managerial - yet the standards are impossibly high. And unlike professional work, domestic labor is never finished. There is always another meal, another mess, another person's need requiring attention.

Studies on emotional labor show that women perform the majority of this invisible work in relationships and families: remembering birthdays, managing schedules, anticipating needs, maintaining social connections, monitoring everyone's emotional states. This labor is real, mentally taxing, and largely unrecognized. When you feel exhausted despite "not working," this is why. The performance of seamless domesticity requires constant effort that leaves you depleted.

Sherman's housewife stares beyond her domestic confines with an intensity that suggests barely suppressed frustration. She is playing the role but dreaming of escape. For women balancing careers with domestic responsibilities, this image resonates painfully. You are succeeding at both and fulfilled by neither, performing constantly while feeling trapped.

The Ingenue: Vulnerability as Performance

View Untitled Film Still #2 at MoMA

Sherman also photographs herself as the young, vulnerable woman - caught in private moments that feel intimate yet staged. These images reference film noir's eternal victim, the woman in danger who needs protection. The performance is one of softness, approachability, non-threatening femininity.

This role is particularly insidious because it appears natural rather than performed. Women are socialized from childhood to be accommodating, emotionally available, non-confrontational. To take up less space. To smile. To make others comfortable. The performance becomes so automatic that many women lose track of where the role ends and the authentic self begins.

The mental health consequences are significant. When you habitually prioritize others' comfort over your own needs, you develop what psychologists call "self-silencing" - suppressing your thoughts, feelings, and needs to maintain relationships and avoid conflict. Self-silencing predicts depression, anxiety, and relationship dissatisfaction. You think you are being kind when actually you are disappearing.

Sherman's vulnerable ingenue reminds us that even private, intimate moments can be performances. The woman alone in her bedroom is still playing a role - perhaps for an imagined male gaze, perhaps rehearsing for when someone is watching. There is no moment of true privacy, no space where the performance stops.

The Bombshell: Beauty as Labor

View Untitled Film Still #14 at MoMA

In images where Sherman embodies glamorous, sexualized femininity, the labor of beauty becomes visible. Hair, makeup, clothing, pose - every element is crafted. The bombshell looks effortless but requires enormous effort to create and maintain.

Contemporary culture has intensified this pressure exponentially. Social media demands constant performance of beauty, youth, and desirability. The Instagram face requires specific makeup techniques, lighting, angles, and editing. The work is substantial but must appear effortless—you are supposed to "wake up like this" rather than spending an hour creating the illusion of natural beauty.

Studies on self-objectification show that when women view themselves primarily through others' eyes - as objects to be looked at rather than subjects who look - the result is body dissatisfaction, eating disorders, depression, and reduced cognitive capacity. When you are constantly monitoring how you appear, you have fewer resources for actual living, thinking, creating, connecting.

Sherman's glamorous women are beautiful but somehow hollow. The performance is so complete that the person beneath becomes inaccessible. This is the danger of the beauty-as-labor trap: you can perfect the performance while losing yourself entirely.

The Suburban Woman: Middle-Class Performance

View Untitled Film Still #10 at MoMA

Sherman also captures suburban, middle-class femininity - women in well-appointed homes, dressed appropriately, maintaining standards. These images feel particularly claustrophobic because the settings are "nice." The woman is not oppressed by poverty or violence but by the suffocating pressure to maintain appearances, to have the right home, wear the right clothes, project the right image.

This resonates powerfully with contemporary pressures around curated living. Your home must be Instagram-worthy. Your children must be thriving. Your relationship must appear perfect. Your life must look enviable. The performance extends beyond your body to encompass your entire environment and everyone in it.

The mental health cost is what researchers call "status anxiety" - chronic stress about maintaining your position, appearing successful, measuring up to increasingly unrealistic standards. You achieve the markers of success - good job, nice home, healthy family - yet feel anxious rather than satisfied because the performance never ends and the standards keep rising.

The Cumulative Effect: Identity Fragmentation

Sherman's genius is not in any single image but in the series as a whole. When you see all seventy photographs together, the cumulative effect is overwhelming. She is every woman and no woman. The multiplicity of roles becomes unbearable to witness.

This is what psychologists call identity diffusion - the inability to maintain a coherent sense of self across the multiple roles you perform. You are one person at work, another at home, another with friends, another on social media, another with family. Each role has different requirements, expectations, scripts. The effort of switching between them is exhausting. More dangerously, you begin to lose track of who you are when no role is required.

Sherman herself described this process: "I was wrestling with some sort of turmoil of my own about understanding women. The characters weren't dummies; they weren't just airhead actresses. They were women struggling with something but I didn't know what." The struggle is the performance itself—the pressure to embody these roles while maintaining a coherent self underneath.

For women today, the number of roles has only multiplied. You are expected to be professionally successful, domestically competent, physically attractive, emotionally available, socially connected, politically engaged, culturally literate, and personally fulfilled. Each role requires performance. Each performance requires energy you do not have.

The Cost of Never Being Off-Stage

What makes Sherman's Film Stills so psychologically acute is that they capture women who are always performing, even in supposedly private moments. There is no backstage, no moment when the costume comes off and you can simply exist as yourself.

This is the crisis of contemporary womanhood: you are never not being watched. Social media means your private life is potentially public. Professional boundaries have dissolved—you are always accessible, always "on." Even in your own home, you are performing domesticity, performing partnership, performing motherhood. There is no space exempt from performance.

The mental health implications are severe. Human beings need downtime - periods when we are not performing, not being evaluated, not managing impressions. We need privacy not just from others but from the internalized gaze that monitors our every move. Without this respite, the result is chronic stress, burnout, anxiety, depression, and a pervasive sense of emptiness.

Reclaiming Authenticity in an Age of Performance

Sherman's Film Stills do not offer solutions - they are diagnosis rather than cure. But they provide clarity about what is happening. The exhaustion you feel is not personal failure. It is the predictable result of a culture that demands women perform multiple, often contradictory roles while making the performance appear effortless.

Reclaiming authentic identity requires radical acts:

• Drop performances that serve no one. Which roles are you maintaining out of genuine desire versus fear of judgment? What would happen if you stopped performing in areas where the cost exceeds the benefit?

  
  

• Create genuine privacy. Establish spaces - physical, temporal, digital - where you are not performing for anyone, including yourself. Where you can be messy, uncertain, unpolished, real.

  
  

• Resist the multiplication of roles. You do not have to be everything. Choosing depth in fewer roles over superficial performance in many is not failure - it is wisdom.

  
  

• Practice integration over fragmentation. Instead of maintaining separate performances for different contexts, practice showing up more consistently as yourself. Let people at work know you have a life outside the office. Let your family see you as a full person, not just a caretaker. The discomfort of integration is less costly than the exhaustion of fragmentation.

  
  

• Challenge the demand for effortlessness. Stop pretending everything is easy. Name the labor. Acknowledge the effort. When you make the invisible visible, you reclaim agency and challenge unrealistic standards.

Sherman's Warning and Invitation

Sherman photographed herself as seventy different women to show us something crucial: when you spend your life performing roles culture assigns you, you risk losing track of who you are underneath. The photographs are beautiful, but they are also terrifying. Each woman looks real, but Sherman is none of them. She is the artist behind the camera who put on and took off all these costumes, who knows they are performances rather than identities.

For women today, the invitation is to become the artist rather than remain the costume. To recognize the roles you perform without mistaking them for your entire self. To choose consciously which performances serve you and which ones are costing you everything.

Sherman's city girl, housewife, ingenue, and bombshell are not cautionary tales because they are stereotypes from a bygone era. They are cautionary tales because they are still the roles culture expects women to perform - updated but fundamentally unchanged. The exhaustion your grandmother felt, your mother felt, you feel, and your daughter will feel unless something changes.

That change begins with recognition. The roles are performances. The exhaustion is real. And you have permission to stop performing long enough to remember who you are when no one is watching.

Visit MoMA

All of Sherman's Untitled Film Stills are part of MoMA's permanent collection. If you are in New York, seeing them in person offers something photographs in this blog cannot - the experience of encountering seventy different women who are all the same person, the cumulative weight of that multiplicity, and the recognition that you have been performing similar roles your entire life.

MoMA is located at 11 West 53rd Street in Manhattan. The Sherman photographs are typically on view in the photography galleries. Seeing them might break something open. It might also offer permission to stop performing and start being.

Authorship

Frederic Kass, MD — Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, Columbia University Medical Center; former Clinical Vice Chair, Department of Psychiatry Profile: Medical News Today

Betty Jeanne Kass, LCSW — Founded and directed the Columbia University Day Treatment Program. An expert in family therapy, she teaches at Rappore.  Betty Jeanne Kass