I turned 37 last month and something shifted. Not a crisis. Not a breakdown. More like a quiet recognition that I’ve been living inside a pattern I never consciously chose, and it’s been running for twenty years.
The pattern is this: I dim myself.
Not dramatically. Not in some obvious, self-destructive way. More like a constant, barely perceptible adjustment – turning down the volume on my enthusiasm, softening the edges of my opinions, making myself just slightly less visible in every room I walk into.
I do it so automatically now that I almost didn’t notice. But once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.
Where the dimming started
I can trace it back to my late teens. I was enthusiastic about things – genuinely, visibly enthusiastic. I got excited about ideas, about plans, about music, about what I was learning. And the feedback I kept getting, from friends, from family, from the general social atmosphere of being a teenager, was that my excitement was a bit much. That I needed to calm down. Cool it. Tone it down.
Nobody said “your joy makes us uncomfortable.” They didn’t have to. The message arrived in eye rolls, in subject changes, in the particular silence that falls when someone is being too much and the room is waiting for them to notice.
So I noticed. And I adjusted.
What psychologists call this is expressive suppression – the habitual inhibition of outward emotional expression. Research by psychologist James Gross at Stanford has shown that this strategy, while effective at reducing visible emotion, doesn’t actually reduce the internal experience of that emotion. You still feel it. You just learn to hide it.
And the research is clear about what happens when you do this chronically. A longitudinal study tracking college students through a major life transition found that habitual suppression led to decreased social support, reduced closeness with others, and lower social satisfaction. The students who suppressed their emotions didn’t just feel worse internally – they ended up more isolated.
That landed hard when I read it. Because isolation isn’t something that happened to me. It’s something I built, one dimmed reaction at a time.
The cost I didn’t calculate
Here’s what nobody tells you about dimming your light: you don’t just dim the parts that make other people uncomfortable. You dim everything.
You can’t selectively suppress enthusiasm while keeping your full creative energy. You can’t tone down your joy while maintaining your capacity for deep connection. The dimmer switch doesn’t have that kind of precision. It’s all or nothing. And when you’ve been turning it down for twenty years, you forget what full brightness even felt like.
A meta-analysis of 75 studies involving over 36,000 participants found a significant positive relationship between authenticity and wellbeing. The correlation wasn’t small – it was substantial enough that the researchers described authenticity as having “positive implications for individual well-being” across ages, genders, and cultural contexts.
The inverse is also true. When you chronically present a version of yourself that doesn’t match your internal experience – when there’s a persistent gap between who you are and who you’re performing – it creates a psychological toll that accumulates over years.
Researchers call this self-alienation – one of the three components of inauthenticity identified by psychologist Alex Wood and his colleagues. Their research found that people who felt their behaviour didn’t reflect their true feelings reported lower self-esteem, higher anxiety, and greater levels of depression. And the people who changed their behaviour most to fit others’ expectations – what the researchers called “accepting external influence” – fared worst of all.
I’ve been accepting external influence for two decades. I just didn’t have a name for it until now.
Why your joy threatens people
The thing I’ve come to understand – and it took me embarrassingly long to get here – is that my enthusiasm wasn’t the problem. Other people’s response to it was.
When you’re genuinely excited about your life, your work, your ideas, your Tuesday afternoon, it creates an uncomfortable mirror for people who aren’t. Your joy doesn’t threaten them because it’s excessive. It threatens them because it highlights the gap between your aliveness and their numbness.
Psychologist and researcher Brené Brown found in her research that people who felt most fulfilled and connected to others shared a critical quality: they were willing to let go of who they thought they should be in order to be who they were. The paradox is that the very authenticity we suppress to avoid rejection is the thing that creates the deepest human connection.
So the people who needed me to dim myself weren’t protecting me from embarrassment. They were protecting themselves from feeling something they weren’t ready to feel.
And I helped them. For twenty years, I helped them stay comfortable at the expense of my own aliveness.
What dimming looks like at 37
By the time you’ve been suppressing yourself for this long, it doesn’t feel like suppression anymore. It feels like personality. You think you’re naturally reserved, naturally measured, naturally cautious about expressing too much excitement. You forget that it was trained into you.
At 37, my dimming looks like this: I downplay good news before sharing it. I add qualifiers to every achievement – “it’s not a big deal” or “I just got lucky.” I pre-emptively tone down my energy when I walk into certain rooms. I catch myself about to say something I’m excited about and pause, recalibrate, decide the room doesn’t need that from me right now.
Research on authenticity and brain health suggests that perceived authenticity – how true to yourself you feel you’re being – is associated with mental resilience and recovery from both individual and collective adversity. In other words, the people who allow themselves to be fully themselves aren’t just happier. They’re more resilient. They bounce back faster. They handle life’s difficulties with more flexibility.
I’ve been doing the opposite. Bracing against my own nature like it’s something to be managed rather than something to be lived.
What I’m doing about it
I’m not turning this into a self-help montage. There’s no moment where I stand in front of a mirror and recite affirmations about my inner light. That’s not how this works.
What I’m doing is smaller and harder than that. I’m noticing.
I’m noticing the moment before I dim. The fraction of a second where I feel something real – excitement, pride, enthusiasm, joy – and then watch myself reach for the dimmer switch. And instead of turning it down, I’m leaving it where it is. Even when it feels uncomfortable. Even when I can sense the room recalibrating.
Psychology Today notes that the habit of making yourself smaller to help others feel bigger erodes your self-worth gradually – not through a single dramatic event, but through thousands of small moments of self-betrayal that compound over time.
I’ve had thousands of those moments. I’m done accumulating them.
The people in my life who matter – really matter – have never once asked me to be less. The ones who did are mostly gone now, and the space they left has been filled by people who can handle the full version of who I am.
It turns out the room was never as fragile as I thought. I was just so used to protecting it that I forgot to ask whether it needed protecting at all.
I’m 37. And I’m done dimming.
If your joy makes someone uncomfortable, that’s important information – about them. Not about you. Not about your joy. And definitely not about how much of yourself you’re allowed to be in the world.
You’re allowed to be all of it.
