bold self-expression
letting go of what others think of you
There’s something revealing about the responses to “cringe” content. I’m thinking of the videos where someone is making really “bad” music, but doing it completely unironically and with a straight face. The comments in response always have this air of indignation to them. It’s not simply “this is bad, I don’t like it”, it’s more along the lines of “this is bad, how dare you do this?”
The implication seems to be that the cringe person has violated some rule, and as a result, they deserve to be mocked. There’s a moral equation there: “yes, this is what happens to people like you. This is what you get for putting yourself out there without sufficient self-awareness.”
The “violation” in question seems to be that lack of self-awareness. Something isn’t “cringe” if it’s consciously bad; it becomes cringe if the creator doesn’t seem aware that it’s bad. Contempt is the reward of the oblivious and naive.
Why is this important? Because it reveals the hidden script that many of us are following when it comes to self-expression.
what is self-awareness?
Again, the “rule” here is that if you are expressing yourself in a public way, you either need to be highly skilled or highly self-aware. To escape cringe, you need to own your own limitations.
But maybe you don’t care about your own limitations; maybe they don’t matter to you. Ah, now you’re in cringe territory. Even if they don’t matter to you, they matter to others, and that’s when it becomes embarrassing. You have to know you’re not good enough.
Self-awareness, in this sense, is the ability to predict how other people react. In this case, the commenters are saying “you failed to predict that people would find this bad, and failed to acknowledge that sufficiently, and thus it is cringe.”
If I post a video of me singing poorly, I might know I’m bad. But if I don’t demonstrate that awareness, I could be acting cringe. It’s not my perception that matters, but rather how I anticipate other people’s responses.
Again, let’s come back to the root belief: “you should be punished if you fail to predict how others will react to you.” Take a moment with that, see how that sits in your body. Does it feel true, to some extent? Does it feel right?
do you get to belong?
We can replace “punished” with “you should be criticized, you should be rejected, you should excluded.” All the same idea: your belonging to the group is contingent on your ability to predict other people’s responses.
From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense. In any community, the ability to predict responses is super important. Someone who can’t do that properly risks offending or alienating other members. It makes sense that our subconscious would have an instinctive knee-jerk reaction to someone without self-awareness: they’re a threat to group cohesion.
But we live in the modern world, where there are infinite communities, and exclusion from one isn’t necessarily a threat (and can even be desirable). So what we actually want to do here is update our unconscious models, update the script that says appearing insufficiently self-aware is a threat.
finding your belonging
Honest self-expression is actually a great filter for finding your community, finding the people who naturally align with you. In a sense, we want to be cringe to the wrong communities, if it means being awesome to the right communities. But our psyches don’t like that very much.
What is tricky about that is surrendering any agenda. Honest self-expression has no agenda. It is self-fulfilling, self-justifying. You do it because there is something in you that wants to be expressed, and you want to see its most beautiful expression. That’s it. If the group likes it, great. If not, well, that wasn’t the point anyway.
honesty & resonance
Honest self-expression means we stop trying to manipulate other people’s perception of us. We just let them have their experience. And it’s important to acknowledge that this is a really really hard thing to do. Our nervous system does not like it. It wants control; it wants to control our access to belonging.
But real belonging, the kind that matters, doesn’t come from manipulation. It comes from resonance. It comes from how our energy naturally draws certain people towards us. The best way to encourage that is to show up as honestly and as boldly as we can.
Yes, we may still want to entertain and delight and please others. But ideally that comes from an honest desire, rather than a fearful attempt at controlling their perceptions. Ideally we create from a place of love, not a place of fear.
It’s not about purposefully being cringe (though that can help). It’s more about giving up the underlying agenda. Letting self-expression be for self-expression’s sake, and then seeing what happens. Do I like the way I expressed myself? Would I like it to be different? How can I make it even better?
And then allowing that process, over time, to lead to the accumulation of belonging: the kind we can trust, the kind that makes us truly feel at home, the kind we’ve always been seeking. We just had to stop trying to grasp it.
With love & appreciation,
Scott
P.S. I posted my first reel on Instagram (ahhh, cringe!) talking through my relationship to my own inner critic. Here it is:
P.P.S. if you’d like to explore your own relationship to bold self-expression, check out my 1:1 coaching. 🍊