I Read My Own Performance Review Four Times Looking for the Lie!

By Prerna Chandra · Sun Jul 26 2026

The light in Conference Room 4B has been flickering for three weeks and nobody’s bothered fixing it. I’m sitting under it anyway with my laptop open, reading my own 360 feedback for the fourth time because I keep thinking I’ve misread it somehow.

There are three names on this feedback and three completely different paragraphs, and somehow they’re all supposed to be describing the same person, which is me.

Rhea writes that I’m intimidating, and she’s careful in the comments box to say it isn’t that I’m rude, just that I feel unapproachable, like she has to rehearse what she’s going to say before she messages me. Arjun writes that I’m the smartest person on the floor, that people should sit in on my reviews just to watch how I think. And Meera, two desks down, writes that I’m the warmest person in her week, that I make Mondays survivable.

Same fifteen weeks, same desk. Three people who apparently spent that whole time answering to my name, and none of them met the same one.

I close the laptop and then open it again almost immediately, because it isn’t that I don’t believe them, it’s that I believe all three at once and that’s the part I genuinely can’t sit with. If Rhea’s right, I’m cold. If Arjun’s right, I’m sharp. If Meera’s right, I’m soft. So which one do I introduce myself as at the next team offsite, and which one do I trust when I’m alone at night trying to work out who I actually was that day?

I spend the rest of the afternoon doing that thing where you replay every interaction like security footage, looking for the moment you slipped and let your real face show. I go through Tuesday’s meeting with Rhea in my head. There’s nothing there. I was exactly as present with her as I was with Meera an hour later, and I don’t remember switching anything on or off in between. I was just there, being whoever I already am.

It’s close to six and the printer’s humming when I catch something from the pantry that clearly wasn’t meant for me, someone mentioning that Rhea got moved off her old team without warning last quarter, and that she’s been guarded with everyone since, not just me, checking her own tone in every message now because the one time she didn’t, it cost her the job she actually wanted.

And the whole feedback report rearranges itself in my head right there.

Rhea didn’t meet someone unapproachable. She met someone she had to be careful around, because that’s the only way she currently knows how to survive a room, and she wasn’t describing my face at all. She was describing her own guard, and I just happened to be standing on the other side of it that particular week.

Arjun, who reads five books a month and corrects his own sentences mid-air before anyone else notices the error, found the sharpest version of me, because sharpness is the thing he’s spent his whole life building in himself. He wasn’t clocking my intelligence so much as recognizing it, the way you recognize a word in a language you already speak fluently.

And Meera, who brings her mother’s turmeric water to my desk every Monday without being asked, found the warmest version of me, because warmth is the currency she deals in everywhere she goes. She wasn’t discovering something new about me. She was finding a familiar place to put something down that she already carries.

Which gets me thinking about Karan, three desks from mine, who I have never once been able to stand, though I’d be hard pressed to tell you exactly why if you asked me outright. He isn’t cruel or difficult in any obvious way people could point to. He just goes quiet in every meeting the moment something needs to be pushed back on, lets a bad decision roll right past him without a word, and it makes something in me go tight every single time. It took me an embarrassingly long while sitting under that same flickering light to admit that the reason it lands so hard is that I’ve done exactly that myself, more times than I’d like to count, sat on my hands in a room while something I disagreed with sailed through, telling myself later it wasn’t the right moment. I don’t hate that habit in Karan. I hate that I recognize it, because recognizing it means admitting it’s mine too, somewhere I haven’t cleaned up yet. That’s the part nobody warns you about the shadow, that it doesn’t only show up in the people we love. It shows up first in the people we can’t explain why we dislike, because they’re holding up a mirror angled at exactly the piece of ourselves we’ve been avoiding.

So maybe I’m not three women, and I never was. I’m closer to a wall painted whatever color the person standing in front of it needs to see that day. We don’t fall for people because of who they truly are, we fall for the part of them that looks like us, the part we recognize like a face in a mirror we didn’t know was hanging there. And when we can’t stand someone, more often than we’d like to admit, we’re recoiling from that same mirror, just catching the angle we haven’t made peace with yet.

The light in 4B is still flickering when I finally leave, and for the first time in three weeks I don’t stop to look up at it.

I’ve stopped trying to figure out which version of me is the real one. Now I just watch which parts of themselves everyone else keeps finding when they look at me.

“You Only Meet People as Deeply as You’ve Met Yourself”