For as long as I can remember, I’ve struggled to put myself out there and express myself in public. This has been the case in my personal life, e.g. when being around a lot of people, I’ve tended to mute myself and let others take the stage. However, it has severely affected my professional life too. While I know I have a strong background and capacity, I haven’t been able to take advantage of it due to my lack of self-confidence and public presence. The last year or two, I’ve come to some important realizations around where this behavior comes from, and this has finally started to set me on a new course. These realizations are also what has given birth to this blog, which previously would have been unthinkable.
About a year ago, I started recognizing an ingrained fear of judgment that had shaped my life. I’d been aware of this for a while already, but this time it was becoming more clear to me why it was happening, and how I could work with it. This realization came through observing another pattern I had ignored for years: I always felt like I was making the wrong choices for myself. I couldn’t find happiness or satisfaction in any direction, and was always looking away from my current path. Somehow I never felt like I truly owned my life. No matter what I did, I always found a way to devalue it.
You may wonder how this fear of judgement and feeling of always making the wrong choices are connected, but it turns out they arise from the same core problem. I had lost connection with my authentic self.
I’m not sure exactly where it came from, but I think the realization came after I started watching videos from Heidi Priebe’s Youtube channel. Initially I started watching it to understand my relationship better, my role in it, and how we could improve it. However, it eventually became clear to me that what she was talking about was not only relevant for my romantic relationships, but all relationships in general, and even beyond that.
Essentially, the discovery was that I had been living in my head pretty much all of my adult life. Somewhere along the way, I had convinced myself that logic and analysis were the only reliable ways to make decisions and navigate life. This led me to externalize my self-validation, disconnecting me from myself. My sense of direction became dictated by the outside world rather than my own internal compass. I started seeing life and decisions as something that could be objectively right or wrong, rather than what was right for me.
It’s not been as black and white as I describe above, I’ve also taken a lot of unconventional choices along the way and in many ways experienced a lot of things most of my peers could only dream of. However, somehow I’ve done these things, but never been able to fully commit to them. I was always second guessing myself, and not owning my decisions and choices along the way. This has lead to a lot of problems. One of them being that I’ve lived with constant doubt that deteriorated my self-confidence and self-worth, but it has also made it really difficult for me to get consistency in my life, and to grow professionally. Moreover, the internal friction from not having a clear direction exhausted my energy and put me in a constant state of stress.
Over the last six months, I’ve come to see how my fear of expressing myself in public is deeply tied to my over-reliance on logic and external validation. I started doing work to understand my emotional life better, and to be proud of the decisions I’ve taken in my life and what I have achieved. Instead of over-analyzing everything, I try to let my body guide me more.
It feels like I’m entering a new phase of my life where I can finally get to a stage where I fully embrace who I am and get the benefits of all the hard work I’ve put in over the years. And that is where this blog comes in. Where I’ve previously hidden in the shadows, defending and rationalizing that state of being with me being an introvert and not liking to take up space, this is something I actively want to change. It’s not about being loud or quiet, introvert or extrovert, it’s about embracing who you are and being proud of it. I strongly believe that this is the only way I can find happiness, but also the only way I can make an impression in this world.
So this represents the moment where I open up. I will start sharing my experiences, both personal and professional, standing for who I am and where I am in my journey. I don’t know exactly which direction it will take yet, whether more focused on my professional pursuits or life experiences, but I expect a bit of both. I expect it will mostly center around topics like finding your own path, struggles and joys of entrepreneurship and startup life, and an unconventional semi-nomadic lifestyle.
In the end what motivated me to actually start blogging was some old words of wisdom from Seth Godin, where he encourages anyone to start writing a blog, even if noone is reading it. Something about that resonated deeply with me this time. So, here I am—stepping out of the shadows, and seeing where this leads. If you’re on a similar journey, I hope you’ll stick around.