It’s weird how your body just decides what to do in an elevator. You stand by the door — just another day, a normal face, thoughts about your own stuff. Then you step inside with a stranger — and everything flips: shoulders go up a bit, eyes dart to the floor numbers or a corner, you move diagonally without even thinking. Your phone pops into your hand like magic, even though a second ago you weren’t planning to pull it out. Like some invisible signal says: now — pretend to be someone else.

No one really taught us this. There’s no manual: how to stay quiet next to a stranger half a meter away; when exactly you can turn to the buttons or how far down to drop your eyes. But everyone does the same thing: faces get calmer, even duller; silence thickens; everyone tries to fade into the background.

Sometimes I catch myself slipping into this automatic elevator passenger mode. Like something inside me already knows — here you gotta be minimal, almost see-through. The weird part isn’t that I repeat this pattern over and over, but how fast I disappear from myself in that moment. There was a person with moods and thoughts — now just a shell with a set of social moves.

It’s like a strange set of coordinates that switch on in every new place: here’s the stairwell — one mode; the street — another; office or store — a third; elevator — a special case. It all happens by itself: none of these roles were ever talked about, but everyone around seems to know them by heart.

What’s curious is how a tiny glitch breaks the whole system. If you suddenly stare at people too long or talk out loud about the weather, the space gets sticky and heavy, and you feel others’ presence on your skin like goosebumps. The anxiety doesn’t come from your head — it’s deeper, like an ancient fear of breaking the ritual.

The power of these rituals scares me because they’re invisible. Break them — and you instantly become a stranger among your own neighbors.

Sometimes I wonder: do I choose to fit in? Or does it just happen inside me without me doing anything? Where do I end — the real me — and where does the shared behavior matrix begin?

If every time my gestures change with the place and people… is there anything left that stays the same under this quick mask swap?