"I want to show up online but I don't want to be perceived."
How I got over feeling cringe.
I used to literally get soooooo anxious whenever I posted anything deeper than surface layer online. My chest would tighten, my breathing would get shallow, my stomach would drop into this spinning pit of knots.
I was convinced people would think I was trying to be an influencer. That I was cringe. That I was embarrassing. As if wanting to be seen publicly was something to be ashamed of. As if being seen at all was something I wasn’t supposed to want. There were moments I wanted to delete my Instagram altogether. Being out there, for strangers to judge, just didn’t feel safe.
Since when did trying become the embarrassing thing?
We made ambition cringe, and now we’re all just... standing still.
But this fear def didn’t come out of nowhere.
I think for a lot of us (myself included ofc), it started wayyyyy earlier than Instagram.
As the eldest daughter, I was the golden child. I was raised to say the right things, do the right things, be polite, lead by example.
And somewhere along the way I learned that the way to receive love was through being perfect. I became an expert at performing. I was so hyper-aware of how I came across that I was constantly self-editing everything (my words, my ideas, the way I showed up in public).
Self-editing mode followed me everywhere. Into school, into the workforce, into the way I built my career. Chasing titles, aligning myself with big impressive brands, climbing a ladder I wasn’t even sure I wanted to be on. It followed me onto the internet. And it made posting anything too deep or too emotional feel genuinely dangerous.
The risk of being perceived as cringe felt like far too high a price to pay.
Buttttt I also knew that I wanted to connect more deeply. I wanted to expand my reach. I wanted to open new doors. And I knew that in order to do that, I needed to stop playing small. I needed to come out of hiding. I needed to get out of my head and get over myself.
Last year, I decided that was the year I stopped hiding my light. I was feeling content with the work I was getting, but I realized that if I was going to get to the next thing, the more aligned thing, I had to stop waiting for permission and start carving my own path.
It didn’t happen overnight. It happened slowly, through practice, exposure therapy, one little piece of content at a time.
The posts that gave me pause, the ones that put my actual inner thoughts and feelings on display, began to lose their weight as soon as I started hitting publish.
There was no single turning point. No lightning bolt moment where the fear disappeared. It just slowly stopped feeling so big. Repetition did what nothing else could. It made the scary thing ordinary.
You don’t wait until it stops being scary.
You go until scary stops being enough of a reason not to share your light.
Late at night I’d sit at my desk and write whatever thoughts came. I started taking pictures of things that caught my eye, voice-noting long-winded thoughts, creating stories based on daily observations. The longer I stayed in the act of creation, the more ideas flowed, and suddenly…words started landing on pages.
My desire to create outweighed my fear of being perceived. The desire to connect. To showcase my words and thoughts. To find my people. To build a body of work. To open doors that weren’t opening on their own. It somehow, suddenly, became so much bigger than the embarrassment.
Sometimes you just need to get out of your head, get over your own bullshit, and hit publish. Being perceived as cringe is better than staying small. The most embarrassing thing isn’t showing up wrong. It’s not showing up at all.
One thing that helped me get out of self-editing mode:
When you spend a lifetime being trained to be perfect, you spend a lifetime in self-editing mode. The problem with that is that it keeps you on the surface. It blocks you from getting to the raw, authentic truth of things — the feelings and thoughts and ideas that live beneath all the polish, in the messy middle.
The thing that helped me most wasn’t a content strategy or a posting schedule. It was voice noting.
When you voice note, your brain doesn’t have time to second-guess itself. You can’t edit mid-sentence. The thoughts just come out whole. The pressure of the blank page is gone.
I made a whole guide on how to actually use it as a creative tool: how to capture, sort through, and turn those voice notes into real content. If you’re curious, grab it here (it’s totally free).
If you’re reading this with something sitting in your drafts (a post, an idea, a thought you’ve rewritten twelve times and still haven’t published) I want you to hear this:
You’re not protecting yourself by staying quiet. You’re just staying stuck.
The version of you that posts anyway, that shows up even when it feels cringe, that decides her/his desire to connect is bigger than her/his fear of being perceived — that’s the version who gets to where she’s trying to go.
Go post it.
