When the glow runs ahead of the ground
You are not faking. You are further along in how it looks than in what is under it.
This is the hardest state to write about honestly, because every honest description of it sounds like an accusation, and it is not one.
You have built something real. The presence is real, the polish is real, the way you land in a room is real and you earned every part of it. Nothing here is fake.
The tell is what it costs
What separates this from radiance is not how it looks. It is what it takes to hold. Radiance costs nothing to maintain because it is simply what is there. This costs something every day, in small increments you have stopped noticing because you have been paying it for years.
You know it by the recovery time. By what happens on the drive home. By how much of the weekend gets spent restoring the capacity to do it again on Monday.
The invitation is not to dim
Nobody is asking you to be less. The work is to build the interior the visible part is standing on, so it stops drawing from reserves to keep itself upright.
Done once, it holds without effort. That is the whole difference.