The Difference Between Humility and Making Yourself Smaller
I must admit, when I was a child, I thought confidence came naturally, without effort or anxiety. I assumed being a grown-up with confidence meant being calm. I definitely did not expect whatever the fuck this chaotic feeling is.
Now at 46, I look online and I do not see this idea of calm. Confidence, especially in creator culture and particularly in the adult industry, often feels like a performance.
Everything is just so emotionally inflated and every other post is some cringey attempt at flexing. Every opinion shared has to sound definitive. We all have to present an image of being untouchable. Posts frequently read like subtle (or not so subtle) attempts to assert one’s rightness and to jockey for status.
Of course I’m overgeneralizing, but whenever I go online I’m hit by this tidal wave of expectation – and it’s clear I’m not the only one. We all seemingly feel this need to signal how amazing we are, how much money we’re making, or the opposite extreme, like how little we care what anyone else thinks. Even sharing moments of vulnerability now feels curated and strategic.
There is this underlying pressure to appear emotionally invulnerable at all times, as if uncertainty itself is socially embarrassing!
At the same time, women especially are still expected to remain “humble.” We are supposed to be confident, but not too confident. Successful, but still self-aware enough to not emphasize it that much. We can be ambitious, but we have to stay approachable. We’re allowed to be intelligent, but can never be intimidating.
There is still this societal expectation that as women, we package our accomplishments in enough politeness and self-deprecation that nobody experiences us as threatening. But the older I get, the less interested I am in either performance.
Part of the problem is that I think we’ve started confusing humility with self-erasure, and confidence with arrogance or superiority.
While they have since revised the entry, in 1998 the Oxford English Dictionary defined humility as “[having] a low opinion of oneself.” But the original roots of the word humility were not about humiliation or making ourselves smaller. The word traces back to the Latin humus, meaning earth or ground.
To be humble originally meant to be grounded. Humility actually means we are connected to reality. A humble person exhibits an accurate sense of themselves, and that is neither inflated nor diminished.
Somewhere along the way though, humility has become distorted into a kind of social theater. It has become associated with self-minimization, excessive modesty, and pretending not to know our own strengths.
Meanwhile confidence has become increasingly tied to dominance, certainty, status signaling, and emotional invulnerability. I don’t know about you, but I feel like we’ve lost that middle ground entirely. (Pun intended.)
And I think the adult industry amplifies this dynamic because so much of the work is built around visibility and perception. Attention, desirability, money, social status, youth, influence, worthiness — all of it is now publicly measured and judged and compared, and it’s all just too much.
Social media rewards spectacle far more than it does emotional steadiness. Modesty rarely performs as well online as arrogance does. The algorithms reward people who sound cool, aspirational, successful, and untouchable. So we’ve all jumped on the bandwagon and present ourselves accordingly.
The result is that a lot of what gets framed as confidence online does not actually seem that confident to me. It feels defensive. It feels like we’re all just trying too hard.
There’s a difference between innately knowing my value and needing to establish superiority. The flimsy flexing, the obsession with being “better,” the endless implication that everyone else is jealous or beneath us — eventually it stops feeling aspirational and starts feeling really empty.
Some people are not projecting confidence so much as trying to outrun being naked in public (literally and figuratively).
Notes From Carly
Want to receive new blog posts by email? Join my mailing list.
I absolutely understand where some of this comes from. The adult industry is bruuuuuuuutal. Visibility is unstable and income fluctuates. Public rejection and mean tweets are daily occurrences. We project our insecurities onto each other all the time.
Obviously, I get why we all have developed this armor. It makes sense that we become performative when we are operating inside systems that reward emotional spectacle and punish imperfections that are, in fact, much more authentic than the shit we’re posting.
But I have found there is a psychological cost to living inside that performance for too long. At some point, that armor becomes a prison. When my entire identity was built around appearing untouchable, eventually I lost the ability to exist as a real human being.
Everything became comparative, with every interaction becoming a subtle dominance negotiation. It felt like every moment of success had to be externally validated. It got to the point where every bit of criticism hit me as an existential crisis. Buying into this creates an environment where we are either performing self-aggrandizement or, conversely, self-deprecation.
Because at the same time, the opposite extreme isn’t healthy either. I have very little interest these days in the kind of false humility that requires me to constantly make myself smaller in the hope that I will remain likable.
I got into the bad habit of pretending that success happened accidentally. I would always downplay my intelligence and skills. I would refuse to acknowledge my expertise because I was afraid of sounding arrogant. Like a lot of people, I confused this behavior with humility, but psychologically, it wasn’t. It was false humility.
And false humility is still a damn performance. It is still deeply concerned with perception and social approval. I was just using self-minimization instead of superiority to achieve it.
Often it became its own form of manipulation, a way of making myself smaller preemptively before other people could criticize me for being too proud and too aware of my own strengths.
I can’t be the only one though. I think a lot of women get trapped in this balancing act. Confidence is acceptable only if it remains sufficiently apologetic. The second we stop minimizing ourselves, people jump to saying we’re conceited or arrogant.
At the same time, if we become too self-deprecating, we will disappear entirely. This tug of war creates an impossible expectation where, if we succeed publicly, we simultaneously have to perform commensurate modesty as well.
What interests me now is the middle ground that almost nobody talks about anymore. Not arrogance, not self erasure, just… groundedness.
The most genuinely confident people I know are usually much quieter than internet culture leads us to believe. They are neither passive nor weak; they are internally stable.
They acknowledge their strengths without turning themselves into mythological figures. These people are able to admit their limitations without collapsing into shame. They don’t need every room to revolve around them, and they also don’t feel compelled to artificially shrink themselves to protect another’s comfort.
I think there is something incredibly inspiring about people who genuinely know who they are.
This is perhaps partly why I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with performative humility. After a certain point, constantly minimizing myself became its own form of dishonesty. If you know you are skilled, strategic, disciplined, intelligent, experienced, or impactful, pretending otherwise does not make you humble. It just makes you smaller.
Humility, at least in its healthiest form, is not about denying our strengths. It’s about having an honest relationship with them. It’s about being grounded enough that our self-worth no longer depends on domination, validation, or self-minimization.
Real confidence is much less theatrical than social media would have us believe. It’s being able to acknowledge our accomplishments without weaponizing them. It’s knowing our value without needing to constantly announce it. It’s having enough self-awareness to recognize both our strengths and our limitations without spiraling into either grandiosity or shame.
Honestly, I think people are craving that kind of groundedness more than we’re admitting. It’s not branding theater (complete with jazz hands), nor empowerment slogans (“you slay queen!”) or endless peacocking (I just made 1MM on OF!), just those people who feel emotionally solid.
And maybe that’s what I’m actually done performing. Not the humility itself, but buying into the expectation that confidence must either inflate itself into superiority or shrink itself into self-erasure in order for me to be socially acceptable.
So here’s to being grounded. I’ll let you know how it goes.
