I spent most of my teenage years curating myself around people and I was quite good at it, the kind of good where I knew which version of myself to bring to which room, which opinions to soften, which jokes to hold back because they might land weird. I think I did it quite smoothly in a way that nobody ever noticed that I was chameleon-ising. And it worked, technically, because people liked me and I got invited to things and I got along with everyone, but nothing I said was ever that funny because I realized much later that being funny requires honesty and I was too busy being carefully acceptable to risk being honest about anything.
Then at some point I just got tired, not enlightened and not brave, just tired of running every thought through six and a half rounds of internal editing before I let it out of my mouth. So I started saying what I was thinking and the first thing I noticed was that people laughed more. Not polite laughs either, real ones. Turns out the things I'd been holding back for years thinking they were too weird or too sharp were the things that were funny, and I'd been sitting on them like an idiot because I was afraid someone might look at me strange. I'd been so committed to being the safest person in every room that I'd accidentally become the most boring one, which if you know me is an achievement because I have a lot of material.
People I've known for years started saying things like "you've changed" and started laughing a lot more around me and I hadn't changed at all, I'd stopped hiding. The friendships got smaller in number and so much better in every other way because it turns out people can tell when you're being real with them and they give you something different back when you are.
I still say things that don't land sometimes and I still occasionally make it weird, but I'd rather make it weird than spend another evening being someone I have to recover from.
Note: If you think that I'm not that funny, that's a you problem, not a me problem :))