It’s 2:47 am in a London club bathroom. The lighting is cruel. Someone is fixing their eyeliner with forensic concentration. Someone else is taking a mirror selfie they will almost certainly post. Another person looks at you with the faint familiarity of someone you’re almost sure you know from somewhere, though you can’t quite place where. And someone is asking a stranger if they’re “okay, babe” in a tone that suggests they are not okay themselves. 

The queue for the cubicle is long enough for small talk, low-stakes confessions, and a subtle negotiation between who you’ve been performing as and who you’re about to return as. 

This is a holding zone. 

Spencer Cahill once wrote about public bathrooms as places people assume are backstage. The idea comes straight out of Erving Goffman, the sociologist everyone vaguely knows for the whole “life is a performance” beat: frontstage is where we’re visibly on, managing impressions, and backstage is where that effort is meant to fall away. Bathrooms are supposed to be where the act drops. 

But Cahill’s point was sharper than that. Once you’re inside, the performance continues, just in a recalibrated form. The rules persist, delicately rearranged. You remain aware of being seen, conscious of time, still moving within an inherited set of expectations: simply no longer the same you walked in with. 

Everyone here is briefly suspended from whatever version of themselves they were on the dance floor. Jackets come off. Lipstick is reapplied. Phones come out, not to take a photo, but to check yourself in the front camera, to verify you’re still you. To see how you look from the outside. To decide what version of you is to reenter. Back into the front of the crowd, closer to the speakers, to dance a bit harder. Drifting back towards the green room to do a quick debrief with friends. Into the quieter realisation that you might be done for the night, and checking, discreetly, if anyone else is ready to leave too. Everyone is running this calculation at the same time, privately, in parallel. 

Cahill’s point was never that bathrooms reveal some truer self. If anything, he was proposing the opposite. These spaces expose how much effort it takes to remain socially intact. You don’t come in to discover who you are. You come in to pass, to check that you’re still legible. 

Eventually, a cubicle frees up. You go inside and lock the door with a click that feels ceremonial. For a moment, that small space is understood as yours. The closed door blocks sightlines and signals a claim. It offers physical protection from potential audiences and a layer of normative protection, where others are expected to look away, wait, and pretend not to notice. 

This logic plays out constantly. Five cubicles, three that lock, and a queue that forms anyway. The others are dismissed without discussion, left empty as the line grows, people shuffle, and time slips by. Bodies and exposure are part of it, but the real issue is slighter. Without a door that fully shuts, the space never quite becomes private. You’re not protected enough to disappear, even briefly. 

Inside, you sit down even if you don’t need to. Half the time you’re not here for the toilet at all. You’re checking your bag, making sure you’re still put together, checking the time, confirming nothing’s gone missing in the dark. A quick scan. You look at your face again, softer this time, less like something you’re actively managing. Maybe you take a breath. Maybe you don’t. It’s quiet in here, but not really calm. Even this pause runs on a timer. You know you can’t stay too long. Someone’s waiting. 

The walls and door are treated as if they cut off far more communication than they actually do. Sound still passes through, footsteps register, the presence of others is never fully erased. And yet conversation stops. Eye contact is suspended. Even people who know each other rarely speak. On the rare occasion acquaintances do exchange a few words through the wall, it’s usually only when the bathroom feels otherwise empty; the moment others are present, the silence snaps back into place. Cahill pointed this out long before any of this felt familiar: these barriers aren’t respected because they’re effective, but because they’re symbolically honoured. The door doesn’t need to seal anything off completely. It only needs to signal that interaction has been temporarily taken out of play. 

Eventually, you stand up, flush for cover, unlock the door, and step back out, reassembled enough to continue.

How little these spaces resemble the fantasy of “being real.” 

Nothing is dropped or revealed. No one arrives at some truer version of themselves. What happens instead is quieter and more procedural. Small adjustments. Minor corrections. A moment spent checking that nothing has slipped too far out of place. It’s less a breaking apart than a pause to make sure things still hold. 

What you arrive at is a decision. 

Do I go back out like this, or do I adjust? 

That decision is constant, now. 

Cahill was writing about sinks, mirrors, and cubicles, but what he really described was a mindset: the constant preparation to re-emerge into public life without disrupting it. Today, that preparation never really ends. We carry the backstage with us. The modern backstage is portable. We make it every time we post, speak, show up, disappear. We’re not pretending to be someone else; we’re negotiating which version of ourselves is appropriate for the room. The audience doesn’t even need to be present anymore. As Cahill observed, the rules are already internalised. 

There’s something oddly comforting in this. A dark humour in the fact that no one is fully coherent, no matter how put-together they look. Everyone is mid-edit. Everyone is half-reassembled. The polished version on the dance floor exists because of the maintenance in the bathroom. 

Maybe that’s why these spaces feel so charged. They’re some of the only places where the illusion briefly cracks, not dramatically, but mundanely. You see someone adjust their face before leaving. You do the same. You share a look with a stranger that says: yes, this is ridiculous, but we’re doing it anyway. 

And then you go back out, sans enlightenment, adjusted only enough to keep going until the next.

Sometimes, of course, none of this is happening at all. Sometimes the music is good, the night is working, and the bathroom is just a bathroom, until, inevitably, it isn’t. 

References

Cahill, Spencer E. (1985). Meanwhile Backstage. Urban Life, 14(2), 142–163. 

Cahill, Spencer E. (1998). The Boundaries of Self: Public and Private in Everyday Life. London: Routledge. Goffman, Erving. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books.