For years i was deeply self conscious about one specific thing about myself. Avoided certain photos because of it. Avoided certain angles in conversations without even realising i was doing it. Carried it around like a spotlight was permanently fixed on that one part of me wherever i went.
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Then one day someone close to me casually mentioned something they were insecure about. Something completely different. Something i had genuinely never noticed about them in all the years we had known each other.And it hit me quietly that they had probably never noticed mine either.
We walk around assuming people study us the way we study ourselves. But nobody is paying that kind of attention. People are far too consumed managing their own insecurities to be cataloguing yours in detail. The thing you are convinced everyone notices the second you walk into a room is usually something only you are even aware of.
This does not mean insecurities are silly or undeserving of compassion. They are real and they deserve patience. But there is something quietly freeing about realising the spotlight you imagine following you everywhere mostly exists only in your own head. Nobody is examining you with the intensity you examine yourself.
I think about all the energy spent managing things nobody else was even tracking. Adjusting how you sit in a chair. Avoiding topics. Holding back from things you genuinely wanted to do because of a flaw that exists mostly inside your own perception and almost nowhere else.
Meanwhile everyone around you is likely doing the exact same thing about something else entirely that you have never once noticed about them either.
It does not erase the insecurity instantly. That part takes longer and looks different depending on the person. But it does loosen its grip a little knowing the audience you are performing for in your head barely exists outside of it.
Most people are not looking at you the way you think they are.
They are simply too busy worrying about themselves.
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