When I started at sixth form and university I felt very unprepared, like I had fallen off track and desperately needed to get back on. We had to say goodbye to a lot of our old friends, go somewhere new and different, and try to make new ones. It had been years since I’d done anything like that. Plus, I was older now. I needed to make a good impression.

So at sixth form, I tried so hard to act more confident and extraverted—I thought everyone would be open and outgoing and I needed to not get left behind. As I was recently getting into MTG, I went to the effort of starting a games club. I imagined that a lot of people would be interested and that I was maybe doing something useful by organising it. In reality, barely anyone came, and I think even those who did were confused about why I was doing it.

I knew that I didn’t dress well, so I spent time on male fashion subreddits, looking at galleries of bizarre outfits that no one around me wore and shopping advice designed for Americans. When I went to university I thought it was paramount that I learn to cook properly, so I got a load of student cookbooks, stressed myself out about shopping, and spent hours in the kitchen when I was tired just to avoid eating something easier.

I was constantly fighting against anxiety, fear, insecurity, and a feeling that “I shouldn’t be doing this”, but I guess I thought that those feelings were the problem, and that I was going to become Normal by pushing through those feelings. I thought that I was lonely because I wasn’t a good enough person, I wasn’t courageous enough, I wasn’t capable or strong or skilled enough.

In the end, I realised that preparedness wasn’t the difference between me and what I saw in other people. Of course they weren’t putting this much effort into their everyday lives—they were just more comfortable learning things as they went along, with other people. So, painfully, I learned being overprepared was making me stand out in a new way. I thought I was pulling out a knife but I had actually spent years digging it in deeper.

I found myself in possession of traits that I always saw praised, e.g. being able to cook, yet still feeling like trash, like it didn’t actually matter.

I learned that traits like confidence weren’t what I needed. “Normal” people were actually nervous about a lot of things. I’d contorted myself around the idea and made myself falsely confident but still entirely odd. (This is why I now completely disrecommend faking it ‘til you make it.)

It took me years to realise all this, but nowadays when I find something hard that everyone else seems to find easy, I’m less likely to respond with more effort. It feels okay now to experiment with putting in less effort, and see if anything actually changes, or if things even improve. Maybe it still takes a lot of time to figure out, but crucially, it ends up being easy. The best way to do something hard is to realise that it’s easy.