In my teens I thought I was an ugly person, and that showed in the way I carried myself. I wore clothes that didn’t fit, I moped along, my hair was long and unkept. Whenever someone looked at me, I’d always be thinking they thought I was ugly.
So I projected how unattractive I felt. I didn’t like myself, and it showed: in how I looked, how I held myself, and especially in the way I talked. The whole time, it was like I was waiting for someone to criticise me, so that my low self confidence could be validated.
At some point in my early 20s I got fed up with that. I decided that I wasn’t ugly any more. If someone looked at me, I would assume they thought I was attractive. It was a little white lie I told myself. I was hacking my brain with manual overrides, until it became automatic.
The difference was enormous. I started to walk and talk with confidence, and I realised that that was the missing component. Once I gained that confidence, it radiated from me. I took better care of myself, not to attain an imagined goal of attractiveness, not out of vanity, but because I wanted to; it felt good to look after this person I now had respect for. From there, I started caring more about how I talked about myself, and gradually, the need to work on and maintain my image filtered out, until I could talk to people confidently, with no worries about who thought what, about whom.
Much late, my “self”, and the attention I paid to it, lessened too, and I began to see people as they are, rather than through my own filter or personal hang-ups. That came much later though, and in hindsight was largely through relationships (romantic and plutonic) with people who accepted me for what I was, until I no longer needed personal validation – i.e., the need to explain myself, in a sort of figurative way, to people.
But I would think that’s something you might experience as you’re approaching the end of your 20s, or part-way through your thirties; before this happens, it’s important to explore who you are and how you want to feel about yourself, without worrying about an achieving an idealised self – after all, that would put you right back where you started, nullifying the confidence that comes with such self-comforted exploration; If you want to be you, then be you.