What a relief it is, when the workplace charade is over and we can just be ourselves.

I don’t believe that everyone at work wears a mask, exactly, but we do put something on in order to be “on” when we’re at work, even if we’re working remotely in a coffee shop and just have to dial in for conference calls. The “on” costumes we wear are not unlike those who spend their days parading about Times Square as cartoon characters: We are expected to be friendly, welcoming, engaging, revved up. No one would probably go so far as to say “loveable,” but that’s not a bad way to describe it.

And when we take off those costumes we can get back to being … not misanthropes, necessarily, but more real about our challenges, more genuine in our feelings about what we saw and heard, and more fully ourselves, perhaps, than some of our clients or coworkers would have experienced with us.

This is something I think many of us are trying to transcend. There’s such pressure to be a “team player” in most organizations that there is an oversized, Mickey Mouse-ish image that we are all supposed to adopt. This is highly pronounced in so many of our social media personas, which tend to be, if anything, even more cookie-cutter. We’re still cheerful on Twitter and Facebook, but also clever, sardonic and relentlessly productive in our updates (especially if we somehow work in digital marketing, which nearly everyone now seems to be).

I don’t mean this as overly negative. There’s something to be said for a costume that allows us to express our best selves, or the selves we aspire to be. Career success is increasingly defined by the moment you no longer fake it but actually make it. The faking is a prerequisite because being a “rockstar” begins with posing on the stage that is your office, an industry conference or a customer meeting.

Personal success, on the other hand, is when there’s less of a dichotomy between the “on” us and the actual us. That doesn’t mean becoming a workaholic but gaining the confidence necessary to assert our personalities in ways that are valuable, even at the risk of conflict. It’s when the costume doesn’t feel so heavy, or so hot, when we take it off at the end of the day. When the costume no longer seems like a big joke.