too loud, too smart, too brown

I have social anxiety. You wouldn’t be able to tell this by looking at me talking to my friends, or even in most cases in a conversation with me, but it’s there. I used to be incapable of starting conversations at all, constantly afraid I’d be seen as too weird or too loud. For years, I was silent in almost every single room I was in, and if you know me, you know I am anything but quiet, so this silence was me hiding, pushing myself down into a shell of a man because I believed I would be perceived as too weird if I was myself. I was afraid of being perceived. Much of my generation has this outlook. Gen Z, as a whole, is often known to curate the perception of their lives that others have. We have created aspects of our personalities for publicity, much in the way celebrities do, but now all of society must do it. Maybe this is part of why we feel less connected to each other; we don’t even truly know each other, just the shows that we put on.

This phenomenon is not as new as it seems, and is actually something that minority communities have, to some extent, always done. The concept of code-switching, a chameleon effect of sorts where one switches dialect and mannerisms depending on the environment they are in, is much like this public performance of personality we now have. I was scared of being seen as too weird, or too loud, yes. But I was also scared of being too brown. I was scared of being the other, so around the people who I knew saw me as the other (white people), I would portray myself as one of them. I wasnt indian, my brownness was just an aside, not a part of my personality. I am reminded of Riz Ahmed’s Statements on Hasan Minhaj’s podcast last week:

“Representation within a broken system means nothing, unless you’re going to try and change that system. There’s no point being in a room if the room just changes you.”- Riz Ahmed

From Hasan Minhaj Doesn’t Know: Apr 1, 2026

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Due to my fears, I was allowing the rooms I was in to change me, to dissect me and remove the parts of me the room, the system, found dirty or wrong. I was allowing my own personhood to be removed in order to feel like I fit in, because I just wanted to be a person, not a “Curry Muncher” or a “Jeet,” or a “terrorist.” So I hid, I pushed myself down, and let the white man destroy me, control me. I became their puppet, I became a good conformist, exactly what was wanted of me, because the social conditioning made me that way, it worked as it was intended to.

I was afraid to be too brown or too loud. I was afraid to be smart. But eventually I came to learn something, regardless of my actions, of whether I pretended to be white or not, if I acted dumb or not. I was still brown, and I would still be treated as such. I would still be told my dad was Osama Bin Laden walking the streets, or asked where I was on October 7th.

Because the thing about perception is that it cannot be controlled. This is why we fear it so profoundly, because we fear that which we cannot control, that which is out of our reach. And the way others perceive us? We have no power in that. It is not just an impression of us, but the stories of us that one has heard, the myths of us that have been made. A perception is as present in action as it is in inaction. Percetion is both the silence between words and the laughs that fill it. Perception is not our world to shape, and the sooner we learn that, the better off we will be. I am not unburdened by the way others perceive me, but by shifting my locus of control externally, I am capable of understanding that the perception others have is preexistent, and the only way to change it is simply to be myself. By pushing myself down, I end up fitting into the archetype so much asked for by the white man, by power. By conforming, you allow power to control you; we must be better than that. We cannot simply perform unless we end up being real. We will never truly have community if every action is but a performance; we must be ourselves, in the truest sense of it all.