“Life is a performance, I thought. Perhaps the word “illusion” would have meant more or less the same thing, but to me “performance” seemed closed to the truth. Standing there in the midst of the crowd that evening, I felt this realisation swirl dizzily through my body in a dazzling splendour of light, if only for an instant. Each one of us continues to carry the heart of each self we’ve ever been, at every stage along the way, and a chaos of everything good and rotten. And we have to carry this weight all alone, through each day that we live. We try to be as nice as we can to the people we love, but we alone support the weight of ourselves”.
— 吉本ばなな
Boadicea's Chariot 
The writer’s name is Yoshimoto Banana, my apologies for not specifying that in the post itself.
All the world’s a stage…….a familiar conceit, methinks, Chris. 🙂