I have this version of myself that only comes out when I'm exhausted.
She's looser. Funnier. She says things I wouldn't normally say — not offensive, just unfiltered. A little zany. People always tell me she's more fun. That she makes the room better. That they wish she showed up more often.
And for a long time I thought that was just what happens when you're tired. Your filter drops. You stop editing. Whatever.
But last week I sat with a harder question: why does the filter exist in the first place?
I've been building Glow Social for over a year now. It's a real product. Real customers. Real revenue. And for most of that time, I've hidden behind it. Voiceovers instead of my face. Process instead of personality. The product speaks, and I stay off screen.
I told myself that was a preference. An aesthetic choice. "I'm a behind-the-scenes person."
But that's not a personality trait. That's a rule. And I didn't write it.
Here's what I figured out, and it's so obvious in hindsight that it's almost embarrassing:
I learned, somewhere very early, that being seen was dangerous. Not physically — nothing dramatic. Just... the quiet lesson that taking up space was a risk. That the safest thing to do was be excellent and invisible. Deliver the work, skip the spotlight, don't make it about you.
That rule worked. It protected me for a long time. It kept me safe in environments where being small was the smart move.
The problem is I'm not in those environments anymore.
I've been performing for an audience that left the room a long time ago.
There's this image from The Untethered Soul — I wrote about it a few weeks ago — where Singer talks about a thorn stuck in your arm. Instead of pulling it out, you build your whole life around never letting anyone touch it. You think you're protecting yourself. But really, you've just given the thorn everything.
That's what I did with visibility. I didn't avoid the camera because I had nothing to say. I avoided it because some very old part of me believed that being seen — really seen, not performing, not polished — was the thing that would get me hurt.
So I built a whole business where I could be excellent and invisible at the same time.
The interesting thing is: the "fuck it" version of me — the one who only shows up when I'm too tired to perform — she's not a different person. She's just me without the gatekeeper.
The gatekeeper is the one checking: Is this too much? Are you taking up too much space? Quick, minimize. Hedge. Let someone else go first.
When I'm tired, the gatekeeper clocks out. And whoever's left is apparently someone people really enjoy being around.
So the question isn't how do I access that energy when I'm rested. The question is: can I fire the gatekeeper on purpose?
I think the answer is yes, but not through willpower. You can't override a rule you don't know you're following. You have to see it first. Name it. Recognize that the rule belongs to a room you're no longer sitting in.
And then you have to practice the new thing, which for me looks like:
Going first on the founder call instead of waiting for someone else to start. Putting my face in the frame instead of just my screen. Saying "we hit 16 users" without adding "it's still early" as a disclaimer. Writing an essay like this one and pressing publish instead of saving it to drafts.
I don't know what to call this version of me. "Fuck it energy" is accurate but probably not something I should put on a business card. Maybe it's just... me. The unshrunk version.
She's been here the whole time. She just needed permission to stop performing.
I'm giving her that now.