standing out
becoming aware of my self-policing
Over the past week, I’ve become painfully aware of how much I filter my actions through the lens of “is this acceptable?” or “will they like me?” If I sense that doing something will make the other person even the slightest bit uncomfortable, or perceive me in a less-than-positive way, I’ll refrain from doing it. This is most acute for people I’m just starting to get to know or even friends I haven’t seen in a while.
Once I noticed it, I couldn’t stop seeing it everywhere, in the most minute interactions. On a Zoom call at work, I turned away from the camera to take notes in another window, and the thought flashed through my head that the other person might think I wasn’t paying attention (!). I was hanging out with a friend in the park and thought about lying down on the grass but stopped myself because I didn’t want to interrupt the flow of conversation (!!).
Most of the time, how you think others will react to you is very far from how they will actually react, and behaving more naturally can open the doors to more authentic connection. We pick up on how comfortable people feel around us by registering what they aren’t doing just as much as what they are doing.
I don’t know why I self-police so much, but I have some theories. When I was seven or eight, my family moved from a largely Chinese neighborhood in Toronto to one that was predominantly non-Asian. So I went from having a lot of shared cultural context with people to having little or no shared context and feeling like I had to relearn how to relate to people and make friends. Since my goal was to fit in, and I couldn’t change how I looked, I learned to change my behavior to match what I thought was socially acceptable. When in doubt, I erred on the side of caution because kids can be cruel, and there’s nothing worse than being labeled “different” at that age.
I doubt the impact would’ve been as strong if my environment had stayed consistent all through childhood, even if I had only grown up among non-Asians. But because of the sudden change from A to B, I learned to adapt by suppressing parts of myself that might be considered “weird” in the new environment.
In immigrant families, I think this behavior is learned and passed down. The desire to fit in is heightened when you move to a country where you don’t know anyone. It becomes a matter of survival to not draw too much attention to yourself because of racism and prejudice and also because you want to find belonging.
My family was very conscious about how we conducted ourselves in public. We shouldn’t talk too loudly because it’s rude to air your private conversations for everyone to hear. It was important to share the sidewalk and walk single-file if people were coming in the opposite direction, even if they were too wrapped up in their own conversations to do us the same courtesy.
Ten years ago, on a roadtrip to Chicago, my friends and I thought of words to describe each other. The one they came up with for me was “mysterious.” At the time, I took it as a compliment because who doesn’t want to be mysterious? This weekend, a friend said, “You have a reserved quality about you,” and I immediately felt it to be true. There was this pent-up-ness in me.
That’s not to say I don’t feel comfortable expressing my thoughts and feelings. The content of conversation is not the issue. It’s more of a body thing: the choice about how to act in a given scenario, except it often happens without my awareness.
It would be so much simpler if it were fully deliberate, but the self-policing happens on autopilot, like my brain is running a script in the background that checks every potential action against the question “will this make the other person uncomfortable?” and the threshold for “yes” is extremely low.
We all learn through conditioning to mediate our actions in big and small ways. It’s a mechanism of having emotional and social intelligence. If you’re watching a play and you know you have to leave early, you’re not going to grab a front row seat because it would be rude to disrupt the actors and the audience. But other times, it’s totally neurotic: obviously no one’s going to bat an eye if I lie down on the grass. Yet we check ourselves anyway because it’s instinctual and feels safer than what we assume the alternative to be. It’s so hard to change this deeply-engrained behavior, but conscious awareness is the first step.
I’m not sure how familiar you are with CBT but there’s a concept of “Core Beliefs”: foundational beliefs that construct or inform higher level thoughts. E.g. someone acts indecisive and the core belief can be something like “it is not okay to make a mistake/mistakes cannot be forgiven.” So for your examples above I would be curious what the core belief (if any) is behind them.