One of my most prominent traits is that I overanalyse everything.
Sometimes it’s helpful. Sometimes it’s harmful.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how I react to things I don’t know, especially when they’re suddenly thrown at me. Work is the perfect storm for this, but I suspect the roots go much deeper than my job.
From the outside, I look calm.
When something goes wrong, people describe me as rational, composed, good under pressure. I’ve handled production incidents, critical launches, angry clients on the phone. I’ve often been the one thrown into the deep end to figure out unknown territory and turn it into something structured for the rest of the team.
That’s the visible side.
The invisible side is different.
Inside, the process is much more turbulent.
The cycle usually goes like this: I face something I don’t know. I freeze internally. Impostor syndrome kicks in. I panic silently. Instead of asking questions, I try to brute-force a solution in isolation.
Eventually, I figure it out. I always have. Then I relax. I see that I did well. I recognise that I learned something. I add the pattern to my mental toolkit.
From the outside, it looks like competence. From the inside, it feels like survival.
And that survival mode is exhausting.
It doesn’t come from arrogance. Quite the opposite. It comes from fear. Fear of admitting I don’t know something. Fear that exposing a gap will somehow reduce me in the eyes of my colleagues. So instead of being vulnerable early, I choose stress later.
Looking back, I realise something else.
For most of my early life, learning came easily. School wasn’t particularly hard. My first jobs didn’t stretch me too far. Then the ceiling rose. The problems got more complex. The people around me became sharper, more experienced, more specialised.
Suddenly things took effort.
That shift made me feel inadequate. As if I had reached that level by chance. As if I hadn’t “earned” it the same way others had. So I masked it. I presented calm. I presented humility. Internally, I felt like a fraud constantly on the brink of being exposed.
The irony is that this very pressure pushed me to grow. But it also cost me energy.
The good news is that the work I’ve been doing on myself is paying off. The mental triggers are still there, but they’re less violent. Less paralysing. I don’t think I’ll ever eliminate insecurity completely — and honestly, I wouldn’t want to. A bit of tension keeps me sharp. Overthinking is part of my wiring. Taking things seriously is part of who I am.
But I do want to recalibrate my internal dialogue.
I want the discomfort to register as growth, not danger. I want stress to signal expansion, not exposure. I want to shorten the gap between the trigger and the realisation that I’m actually fine.
Because that gap, that latency, is where most of the suffering happens.
If I can reduce that, I reduce the unnecessary pain while keeping the growth.
I’m not perfect. I never will be. But I am much more aware.
And awareness, for someone like me, is already progress.