The Art of Getting Away with Being Yourself

Experimenting with Authenticity to End Social Anxiety

Psychologists throw around a lot of definitions for social anxiety—fear of judgment, hyper self-consciousness, a survival instinct run amok. But I think a simpler definition is this.

Social anxiety is a fear of being authentic.

Authenticity is the natural, unfiltered truth of who you are in any given moment. It’s letting yourself say what naturally comes to mind and acting how you would if no one were watching.

But when life teaches you early on that being yourself comes with consequences, it starts feeling safer to edit, filter, and second-guess. Your instinct to get along peacefully with others overrides your instinct to express.

Congratulations, you’ve just installed your very own authenticity handbrake.

Your Authenticity Is Now Under Strict Regulation

Imagine you’re a carefree kid, minding your own business, when a van rolls up to your front yard. A couple of clipboard-wielding bureaucrats hop out and—before you can ask what’s happening—they flip open your head and start tinkering with your brain.

They’re installing an emergency brake on your expression.

"Standard procedure," they assure you. "Can’t have you running around saying whatever comes to mind—that’s how cult leaders are born."

From that day forward, each time you got too loud, too weird, or too honest, anyone with even a shred of social authority was free to yank the brake.

Perhaps you screamed at your sibling and got sent to time-out.

(Yank.)

Or maybe you belted out a song in front of your friends, only to have your singing voice ruthlessly mocked.

(Yank. Yank.)

After some time of this, you got the message and started pulling the brake yourself—better to self-censor than risk ostracism or public execution of your dignity.

The Tension Between Authenticity and Socialization

Now, here’s the thing: Kids need to learn something about managing their impulses to get on successfully in social life.

If a child acts on every impulse and still does this past age four, congratulations—you may have a tiny psychopath on your hands.¹ Left unchecked, this kid is on track to be the kind of adult who flips conference tables. Such a child risks having no friends, falling to the fringes of society, and possibly landing in prison.²

So, it's in this child's best interests to learn to play well with others.

But neither is it healthy to deny their natural emotional impulses because no emotion is "wrong." Emotions need acknowledgment. Yet, society demands they be neatly packaged, leaving us stuck between self-expression and social survival.

So what’s the move for parents here? Raise a walking HR violation or a perfectly behaved husk of a human?

I’ve come across a compromise that works, but if I start talking about that now, we’ll be here all day. So, let’s get back to the point.

You're Still Pulling the Emergency Brake When it's Not an Emergency

By the time you’ve mastered the basic art of not committing crimes, you've probably gained enough human decency to consider the wellbeing of others. Perhaps you could ease off the emergency brake and reclaim some of that lost authenticity, right?

But no. Your brain, ever the overachiever, keeps slamming it down like a game show contestant buzzing in at the wrong time.

This is because, somewhere along the line, the message, "Hey, maybe don’t scream at your sister" morphed into "Hey, maybe don’t feel anything disruptive at all." One minute, you’re being taught not to hit your sibling with a Tonka truck, the next, you’ve accidentally trained yourself to suppress every mildly inconvenient emotion to avoid rocking the boat.

And the best part? It wasn’t just your parents running this emotional re-education program. No, no—society at large got in on the action too. Your peers, your teachers, that one popular kid in middle school. Everyone had a say in shaping your unspoken social rulebook.

You’re no longer pausing to think, "Should I say this?" because you’ve already convinced yourself you don’t even feel it. Over time, these little dos and don'ts solidify into a thick, mostly unconscious rulebook dictating what is and isn't acceptable to express.

And just like that, the handbrake on your authenticity isn’t just tapped—it’s fully engaged.

The Case For Coming Back to Yourself

There are two ways you can think about this—psychologically or spiritually. I don’t particularly care which one resonates with you, so pick your poison.

The Psychological Case: The False Self Will Betray You

Say you meet someone new, and instead of being your real, weird, possibly-too-much self, you present a curated version—polished, agreeable, optimized for maximum likability. It works.

They like you. You’re in.

Fast forward six months. You’re tired. Exhausted, actually. Because now, this relationship is built on the expectation that you are the person you pretended to be. You’ve set the baseline, and any deviation feels like breaking character. So now you have two options: continue playing the role until you snap, or start introducing the real you and watch them wonder why the hell you’ve changed.

It’s a trap of your own making, and the only way to avoid it is to set the right expectations from the beginning. Be yourself—unedited, unpolished, the kind of you that occasionally says something weird at dinner. That way, anyone who sticks around is sticking around for you and not some carefully managed performance.

The Spiritual Case: Vibration, Manifestation, and the Highest Frequency of All

If you hang around spiritual spaces long enough, you’ll hear people talking about vibrations. Everything has one, apparently. Love, joy, and gratitude are high vibrations. Fear, guilt, and shame are low vibrations. The general idea is that you attract what you vibrate at, so if you’re hanging out in the low frequencies, you’ll keep pulling in situations that reinforce them.

And right at the top of this vibrational hierarchy? Authenticity.

Why? Because authenticity is the truest, cleanest signal you can send out into the world. It says, “This is me. No distortions, no pretending, no second-guessing.” And when you operate at that level, you stop attracting situations and people that require you to be anything but yourself. Instead, you align with the things that actually match you.

So whether you believe in this vibrational stuff or not, the logic holds: The more authentically you show up, the more likely you are to get the things that genuinely suit you. And that means less time wasted on people and situations that require constant self-editing just to function.

At the end of the day, whether you see it as psychological conditioning or energetic alignment, the message is the same: Being yourself is the only way to get what you actually want out of life.

The Shortcut to Being Myself (That Didn’t Work)

Needless to say, I'm only writing about this because it's a problem I've personally grappled with. It's probably the main problem I've grappled with.

Thankfully though, I found a solution to all of this real fast at just 17.

That solution? Alcohol.

A couple drinks, and my thick rulebook of dos and don’ts went out the window. Suddenly, I didn’t have to think so hard. I could just be—express whatever I wanted to express. I could cry from stress, hit on my friend’s boyfriend, and when I was done, throw up on my shoes.

It was glorious. And also a problem.

Because the rulebook wasn’t mine. It was a jumbled mess of expectations, cobbled together from parents, teachers, peers, and society at large. And while alcohol let me bypass it, it also stopped me from realizing I could throw it out entirely. Instead of questioning where these rules came from and whether they even served me, I drowned them in beer and twirled around under strobe lights.

Maybe if I hadn’t been pickling my nervous system and puncturing my energy field with booze on the daily, the kind of people who actually resonated with the real me would have vibrated into my reality.

But I didn’t know any of this stuff back then.

So, boozed-up I remained, struggling to function around the very people who’d convinced me it wasn’t safe to be myself.

A Better Solution: Experimenting with Authenticity

I eventually realized booze wasn’t the answer.

The real secret is to fake it till you make it. Not faking your personality—because we’re talking about authenticity, remember?—but faking the courage to see what you can get away with.

Sometimes, the only way to know it’s safe to be yourself is to test it. And lucky for me, travel provided the perfect playground.

When I was 19 and on exchange in Japan, I ran an experiment. I decided to act like I wasn’t socially anxious. I put on my brave-girl pants, struck up conversations with dormmates, and generally behaved like the version of me I suspected might exist under all the fear.

To my surprise, it worked. People responded well—not just to the experiment but to me. That semester, I quantum-leaped in confidence, finally taking a step toward reclaiming the person I was before life trained me to be someone else.

I changed so much that by the time I returned home, I had to reset everyone’s expectations of me. I lost some friends and attracted some new ones, which I now see as my change in frequency at work.

I did the same thing again on my recent travels to Thailand.

This time, I adopted a relaxed persona, hoping to train my nervous system to match. I let myself act like a stoner and started talking openly about crystals, astrology, and all things “woo-woo.”

And guess what? People still liked me—a lot, actually. But more importantly, I liked me.

It was another quantum leap.

Acting Your Way Back to Yourself

If you feel good on the inside but know you’re dampening your glow, try running an experiment.

Any of us can wipe our pasts, put behavior ahead of identity, and just practice acting like how we feel on the inside. All it takes is the ability to “act,” even just a little. (And lucky for me, I was the lead in a school play once.)

The way I see it, if you can convince yourself that your fear-based rulebook is real, you can convince yourself it isn’t. So, start small.

Let's say you tend to people-please. When a coworker asks if you want to join their fantasy football league and you have absolutely no interest, experiment with being disagreeable. Resist. Say no!

(Or, "No thanks, not my thing.")

Or maybe you’re into astrology, but you're worried others will roll their eyes. When someone starts talking about their Myers-Briggs type, take it as your cue to say something weird.

("You're into personality tests? Classic Virgo.")

Try it and see what happens. Worst case, someone cringes—best case, you realize nobody actually cares as much as you thought. Each tiny experiment chips away at the gap between your real self and the one you’ve been performing. And before long, you won’t be faking it—you’ll just be it.

Final Thought: Authenticity as Freedom

Social anxiety is just fear dressed up as self-preservation. But when you start peeling back the layers, you realize it’s not protecting you from anything real.

Authenticity is freedom. It’s letting the world see you as you are and trusting that the right people will stick around.

So take the leap. Run an experiment. Be a little weird. You might just find that being yourself feels better than you ever imagined. And who knows? Maybe life will reward you for ditching the emotional straightjacket by sending the right people, opportunities, and experiences your way—ones that match who you really are.

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1. Chen, H. Y., Meng, L. F., Yu, Y., Chen, C. C., Hung, L. Y., Lin, S. C., & Chi, H. J. (2021). Developmental traits of impulse control behavior in school children under controlled attention, motor function, and perception. Children, 8(10), 922.

2. Moffitt, T. E., Arseneault, L., Belsky, D., Dickson, N., Hancox, R. J., Harrington, H., ... & Caspi, A. (2011). A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(7), 2693-2698.