They say “be yourself,” but which one? Because I’ve got about fifteen different “selves” queued up like Netflix profiles. There’s “academic me,” “funny me,” “therapist friend me,” “mysterious girl in sunglasses pretending she has her life together me.” All starring… me, all slightly different fonts. People call it adaptable. I call it being a chameleon.
It’s not deception. It’s diplomacy. The art of reading a room so hard you could major in it. Some people camouflage in forests; I camouflage in social dynamics. I can switch from polite class participation voice to chaotic night-drive philosopher in two minutes flat. I match energies like Spotify shuffle: sometimes seamless, sometimes emotionally jarring.
But here’s the kicker: when you’re good at being everyone, you start forgetting how to just be someone. It’s like living in a house of mirrors, you know, reflections everywhere, but no centre. You wonder: am I charming or just deeply scared of rejection? Do I genuinely like this or am I just mirroring enthusiasm because I crave belonging like oxygen?
And still, I defend it. Because being a chameleon doesn’t make you fake. Rather, I think, it means you care. You want people to feel at ease. You want the conversation to flow. You want everyone to laugh, even if your throat’s sore from performing. You colour yourself to match every wall, not because you’re hollow, but because you’ve spent your whole life trying to make rooms feel safe.
But sometimes, safety costs identity. You end up everyone’s favourite version of you, except your own.
The science of shapeshifting.
Psychologists call it self-monitoring. I call it emotional karaoke. We high self-monitors pick up tone, tempo, and social cues faster than autocorrect picks up typos. We study faces, read silences, predict awkwardness before it arrives. We’re basically walking vibe detectors. It’s impressive. And exhausting.
Usually, it starts early. Maybe you grew up in a house where moods swung like pendulums, so you learned to anticipate them. Maybe you were the middle ground in every fight, the glue that kept people from breaking apart. Maybe you just realised that being agreeable was the easiest way to stay liked, and “liked” felt close enough to “safe.”
So you built this social sixth sense, and oh, how it serves you. You’re charismatic, reliable, emotionally literate. You can talk to anyone. But it also backfires, because when every interaction feels like a scene to rehearse, your whole life becomes an audition. And no one tells you that the callback list never ends.
You start mistaking adaptability for identity. You convince yourself you like what everyone else likes. You half-convince yourself that your flexibility is freedom, but deep down, you know it’s not. It’s management. Crisis prevention. It’s giving “human buffer zone” energy.
And it’s not that you’re lying. You’re just editing. You’re cutting out the bits that make people flinch, the parts that might not land right. You get good at it. Too good. Until someone asks, “What do you think?” and you freeze, not because you don’t know, but because you’ve learned not to risk being wrong.
The people-pleasing paradox.
You want to know the most ironic part of being a chameleon? The more you adapt, the more people adore you; but the less you adore yourself. You’ve built a personality that everyone can plug into, like emotional Wi-Fi. Reliable, comforting, available. And yet, you log out every night feeling a little bit ghosted by yourself.
You tell yourself, “I’m just good with people.” Translation: I’m fluent in self-erasure. You don’t mean to lose yourself; it just happens one compromise at a time. You laugh a bit too loud to fill the silence. You agree a bit too fast to keep the peace. You become so agreeable you start blending into background noise.
But here’s the truth: you’re not doing this for attention. You’re doing it for acceptance. You crave connection, not spotlight. You just want to feel safe enough to exist without defending your presence. That’s what people never understand about “people-pleasers”: it’s not vanity. It’s survival instinct.
And sure, the compliments pour in, “you’re so easy to talk to,” “you’re so mature,” “you’re everyone’s favourite.” But it’s bittersweet, isn’t it? Because none of them know you well enough to love the unfiltered version. They love the edited cut. The “PG-13 for public consumption” version.
So you become everyone’s comfort character, but you start realising you’re nobody’s main plot.
The friendship chameleon effect.
It’s wild how being liked by everyone can feel lonelier than being hated. You’re the emotional translator of your friend groups, the one who bridges clashing personalities, who remembers birthdays and mediates fights. But when you’re always adjusting to fit everyone else, no one ever thinks to adjust for you.
People confide in you because you listen. They say, “You just get me.” But that’s because you do the work of getting them first. You learn their humour, their triggers, their comfort levels. You meet them exactly where they are, and they rarely meet you back.
Over time, your friendships start to fracture into fragments. Each person knows a version of you: the calm one, the chaos one, the therapist, the clown. All true, but incomplete. You realise no one in your life has the full picture, because even you’ve lost track of it.
The worst part? You can’t even blame them. You trained them that way. You’ve always been the consistent one, the “you’re fine” one, the “don’t worry about me” one. Until one day, you’re scrolling through texts, realising half your connections are built on what you give, not who you are.
And still, you love them. Because that’s what chameleons do: love loudly, even if it means fading a little in the process.
Identity in beta testing.
You ever look in the mirror and feel like you’re beta-testing your own personality? Like, “Version 4.3 of me seems stable, let’s roll her out this semester.” You’re not broken. You’re just iterative. Constantly updating yourself to match the latest patch of the people around you.
Here’s the secret nobody tells you: your identity isn’t missing, it’s fluid. You’re not two-faced. You’re multifaceted. You can be loud and introspective, chaotic and gentle, brilliant and terrified, all at once. Humanity isn’t a brand, it’s a playlist.
Maybe the goal isn’t to pick one version and stick to it. Maybe it’s to accept that “consistency” was never the goal. You’re allowed to evolve. You’re allowed to contradict yourself. You’re allowed to change opinions, aesthetics, and energy levels without sending out a press release.
You’re not confused. You’re curious. And curiosity is a far better compass than certainty ever was.
So next time someone says “you’ve changed,” take it as a compliment. Of course you have. You weren’t meant to stagnate. You were meant to shift, shimmer, expand, and unlearn the art of apologising for being many things at once.
The loneliness of being everyone.
There’s a peculiar ache that comes with being understood by everyone but known by no one. It’s not dramatic loneliness: it’s quiet, slow, polite. The kind that sits with you in the middle of a crowd while you’re cracking jokes and wonders if anyone could describe your laugh when you’re not trying to be funny.
You spend so much time adapting that solitude becomes foreign. You crave stillness but fear it, because when the noise stops, the real you shows up, and she’s rustier than you remember. You try to talk to her, but she’s shy. She’s not used to having the mic.
This is the heartbreak of the social chameleon: being surrounded by love and still feeling unseen. Because love built on adaptation feels like applause after a performance; validating, but fleeting.
And yet, there’s something beautiful about that loneliness. It’s proof that you still want to be known. That somewhere beneath the practiced smiles and perfect timing, there’s a version of you begging to breathe freely.
Finding the real you beneath the colours.
So who are you, really? The calm one, the chaotic one, the one who remembers everyone’s coffee order, the one who needs to lie on the floor and cry every Sunday night? Yes. All of them. The truth isn’t one version, it’s the overlap.
Being a chameleon isn’t a flaw. It’s an art form. It means you’re sensitive enough to see nuance, brave enough to evolve, and kind enough to care how your energy lands. That’s not fake. That’s empathy in 4K resolution.
The goal isn’t to stop adapting. It’s to stop apologising for it. To choose which shades you wear instead of bleeding into the background. To realise you don’t have to pick between the versions of you; you can integrate them.
You are not a mirror. You are the entire prism. Every light that passes through you bends differently, and that’s your power. You can belong anywhere, because you carry belonging within you.
So yeah, maybe I’m a chameleon. But I’ve stopped changing to survive. I change to expand. I blend because I’m curious.I reflect because I feel. And when I finally settle, in a quiet room, alone, unmasked, I find the version of me that’s been constant through it all.
And she’s spectacular.
Want more essays that unmask the psychology behind our everyday pretending, without shaming the softness beneath it? Come find us at Her Campus at MUJ, where we write the truth even when it stings. Written by Niamat Dhillon at HCMUJ, shapeshifter by survival, storyteller by choice.