The Version of You That Learned to Fit In

When you walk into a room where you don’t know many people, what happens?

Not what do you do. What happens. Inside, before you’ve said a word to anyone.

For some men there’s a switch that flicks on almost automatically. A version of you that’s slightly louder, slightly funnier, slightly more “on” than you actually feel. Easier to be around. Safer to be around.

For others it goes the other way. A different switch: quieter, more reserved, tuning in rather than turning up the volume. Watching the room. Listening before speaking. Taking it all in from a slight distance.

I’m more the second. But I’ve learned to run the first when the situation seemed to demand it. And that’s where things get complicated.

The “should” that doesn’t hold up

Men are told to just be themselves in social situations. Relax, be natural, people will like you for who you are.

For some men, in some rooms, that’s true. But for a lot of men, especially those who found group settings uncomfortable from an early age, being yourself was never actually the safe option. So they learned something else. A version of themselves that worked. That bought inclusion, or at least tolerance. And they got so good at running it that they forgot it was a strategy at all.

Where mine came from

I worked mine out at school.

I was awkward. Uncoordinated. Didn’t fit the standard template for how a boy was supposed to move through the world, on the football pitch, in the changing rooms, in the loud, jostling social geography of secondary school. I wasn’t the sporty one. I wasn’t the tough one. I needed a different angle.

What I found, more or less by accident, was that I could make people laugh. Not the obvious jokes. Something more offbeat, a bit sideways, borrowing from comedians I’d watched and half-digested. And it worked. The awkwardness became part of the act. The incoordination on the football pitch became something you could laugh at together rather than something that made you a target. Sensible Soccer on someone’s computer after school was more my speed, and that was fine, as long as you could laugh about it.

I wasn’t being seen. But I was being included. At fourteen, that felt like enough.

The same strategy, thirty years later

The thing about a coping mechanism that works is that it keeps running on repeat, over and over, long after the original problem has passed.

I remember an evening, years later. I’d gone out wanting connection. The people I was supposed to be meeting hadn’t turned up. The pub was crowded and loud, and I got pushed into socialising with strangers. So I did what I always did. The jokes, the performance, the “on” version of me.

And someone told me afterwards that I made them feel tense and nervous.

I’ve thought about that a lot since. The strategy I built at fourteen to make myself tolerable in a room was still the one I was running in my forties. And it wasn’t working the same way anymore. Maybe it was working too well and unsettling people. Maybe it was just visibly a performance by then. Either way, something that was supposed to create connection was creating distance instead.

The mirror of an old friend

I met a school friend recently. He’s a CEO now, answerable to shareholders, paying private school fees, thinking about a bigger house. He spent a lot of our conversation talking about how much tax he pays, how little some people work, the pressures bearing down on him from every direction.

I recognised something in it. Because I used to be that man.

Not the same details. But the same shape. A performance of a life, built around the signals that say you’re doing well, you’re succeeding, you’re the right kind of person. When I told some friends I now take ten weeks off a year, they laughed. What?! How?! The laughter wasn’t malicious. It was the sound of people for whom that kind of life is genuinely unimaginable. Because they’re still inside the performance, and the performance doesn’t have room for ten weeks off.

I’ve spent six years redesigning my life after it fell apart. I’m genuinely lucky to have had the chance to do that. And sitting with my old friend, I felt something I wasn’t expecting: not superiority, not pity, just a quiet recognition of how far I’d come from the man I used to be. And how much of that journey had been about learning to take the mask off, slowly, in the right company.

What the mask costs

The mask buys things. Tolerance. Inclusion. A kind of belonging. In the right context, performed sociability is a genuinely useful skill, I’m not dismissing it.

But it has a cost that compounds over time.

It’s exhausting, particularly if you’re someone who finds group settings draining by nature. You can be in a room full of people who like you, who laugh at your jokes, who enjoy your company, and feel completely alone. Because they like the performance. They don’t know the person behind it. And after a while, you start to wonder if anyone does.

The research has a name for part of this. Normative male alexithymia: the finding that men are systematically socialised, from childhood, away from emotional vocabulary and emotional expression. The mask isn’t a personal quirk. It’s the product of decades of messaging about what men are and aren’t supposed to be in public. Most men don’t develop it deliberately. They develop it because the alternative, being visibly uncertain, visibly struggling, visibly themselves in a room full of people, felt too exposed.

The introvert tax

If you’re also someone who finds groups and noise draining rather than energising, the mask is doubly expensive.

Not only are you performing. You’re performing in exactly the environments that cost you most. And then wondering why you come home from social situations feeling worse than when you left, not better.

The answer isn’t more socialising. It isn’t pushing through. It’s understanding that performed sociability in exhausting environments is not connection. And that connection, real connection, tends to happen somewhere much quieter, with one or two people, where the mask can come down because it doesn’t need to be up.

What this is actually about

The mask is rational. It was the right solution to a real problem at the time. A kid who didn’t fit the standard template found a way to survive and belong. That’s not a failure. That’s ingenuity.

The issue is that it runs on repeat, over and over. Long after school ended, long after the original problem passed, the switch still flicks on in any room that feels uncertain. And it crowds out the thing that would actually help: not being liked, but being known.

Being known requires something the mask actively prevents. Letting people see the version of you that isn’t performing. The uncertain one. The one that doesn’t always have the right line. The one that sometimes just needs to say “I’m finding this hard” without immediately making a joke about it.

That’s a skill too. And like all the skills we’ve talked about in this series, nobody teaches it to you. You have to work it out, usually by getting it wrong enough times that you finally stop.

Change one thing

Think of one social situation where you notice the switch going on. The version of you that’s slightly more “on” than you actually feel.

You don’t need to take it off yet. Just notice when it appears. Notice what it’s protecting. Notice the gap between that version of you and the one that exists in the quieter moments.

That gap is where the real work is. And noticing it is the first step.

Ways I can help

The Grounded Mind is my 90-day 1:1 coaching programme for professional men working through exactly these patterns. I have space for a small number of new men right now. Reply here to find out more.

The Purpose Project helps men reconnect with what they actually want from their lives. Start with the free micro-course here.

References

Levant, R.F. et al., normative male alexithymia, Journal of Men’s Studies.
American Psychological Association, Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men, 2018.
Connell, R.W. & Messerschmidt, J.W., hegemonic masculinity, Gender & Society, 2005.