There’s a version of you that learned to shrink.
Maybe it happened in school, when you realised that being too enthusiastic about something made you a target. Maybe it was at work, when you swallowed an opinion because the room wasn’t going to receive it well. Maybe it’s been happening so gradually, for so long, that you can’t quite remember when you stopped being fully yourself and started being the version of yourself that makes everyone else comfortable.
If that lands somewhere, keep reading.
The Mold Gets Built Early
Nobody wakes up one day and decides to stop being authentic. It’s more subtle than that.
From childhood, we receive thousands of small signals about which parts of ourselves are acceptable and which aren’t. Be competitive, but not too competitive. Be confident, but not arrogant. Be sensitive enough to be likeable, but not so sensitive that people worry about you.
The result? Most men walk around wearing a version of themselves that’s been carefully edited for public consumption. Professionally palatable. Socially safe. And quietly exhausting.
Conformity is a deeply human instinct – our brains are wired for belonging, and belonging historically meant fitting in with the group. But there’s a significant difference between natural social adaptation and abandoning who you actually are to keep the peace.
One is flexibility. The other is slow suffocation.
The Cost of Performing a Life You Didn’t Choose
Here’s what conformity actually costs, because it’s rarely free.
When you consistently act in ways that contradict your values, your personality, or your actual beliefs, you create what psychologists call cognitive dissonance – a kind of internal friction between who you are and how you’re presenting yourself. Over time, that friction becomes chronic stress. Low-grade, background-noise stress that you get so used to you stop noticing it.
You also lose something harder to measure: the sense that your life is actually yours.
Think about men you know who seem genuinely at ease in themselves. Not the loudest in the room, not the most performatively confident – but settled. Grounded. Like they’ve stopped trying to be something and just… are something. That quality is magnetic. And it almost always comes from the same place: they stopped needing external approval to validate their internal experience.
That’s not something you can fake. But it is something you can work toward.
“But Won’t People Judge Me?”
Almost certainly, yes. Some of them.
Here’s the thing about authenticity that nobody tells you upfront: it’s not universally popular. When you stop performing the version of yourself people are used to, some of them will be unsettled by it. Some will push back. A few might even quietly disappear from your life.
And that, as uncomfortable as it sounds, is often the point.
The relationships built on the performed version of you aren’t really relationships with you. They’re relationships with a character you’ve been playing. When the character changes, those relationships either deepen (because now they’re real) or they fall away (because they were never real to begin with).
Neither outcome is a loss. Only one of them feels like one initially.
As Brené Brown’s research on vulnerability puts it, genuine connection requires being seen – actually seen – and that’s only possible when you’re actually showing up. You can’t have real intimacy with a mask on.
Authenticity Isn’t Self-Indulgence
Let’s address the misunderstanding head-on, because it comes up a lot.
Being authentic doesn’t mean saying whatever you think, whenever you think it, with no regard for context or consequence. It doesn’t mean using “I’m just being honest” as a cover for being unkind. And it definitely doesn’t mean refusing to adapt, grow, or take feedback on board.
Real authenticity includes self-awareness. It means knowing your values clearly enough that you can navigate different contexts without losing yourself in them. You can be more reserved in a professional setting than a personal one, adjust your communication style for different people, and still be fundamentally, consistently you underneath it all.
The difference is internal. Are you adapting because it serves the situation, or are you contorting because you’re afraid of what happens if people see the real thing?
One is maturity. The other is fear wearing a very respectable coat.
How to Start Choosing Yourself
This doesn’t happen overnight. Unlearning a lifetime of performing takes time, and some honest discomfort. But here’s where it tends to start:
Get clear on your actual values. Not the values you think you should have, or the ones that look good on a company website. The ones you actually live by, or want to. What genuinely matters to you? What do you consistently compromise on that leaves you feeling hollow afterward? Values clarification exercises are worth the time.
Notice the gap. Start paying attention to moments where what you say or do doesn’t match what you actually think or feel. Not to judge yourself for it – just to see it clearly. Awareness comes before change, always.
Practice small acts of honesty. You don’t have to start with the big stuff. Share an actual opinion in a low-stakes conversation. Decline something you’d usually agree to out of obligation. Tell someone what you’re really thinking, once, and see what happens. The muscle gets stronger with use.
Let go of the approval audit. Most of us are running a near-constant background check on how we’re landing with other people. That’s exhausting, and it keeps you permanently oriented toward the outside rather than the inside. External validation is a hungry animal – you can feed it indefinitely and it never gets full.
The Men Who Got There
History – and the room you’re currently standing in – is full of men who chose authenticity at a cost, and came out the other side of it with something no amount of conformity could have given them: respect that’s real, work that means something, relationships built on solid ground.
They’re not the ones who played the game perfectly. They’re the ones who decided at some point that the game wasn’t worth playing at the cost of themselves.
That decision is available to you too.
Not tomorrow. Not once everything settles down and the timing is right. (It never is, by the way. That’s a trap with no exit.)
Now. In whatever small way you can manage today.
Because fitting the mold might keep you safe. But it will never make you free.