Essays

Essays on self-awareness, emotional intelligence, identity, and the psychology of living with clarity, purpose, and connection.

Some truths don’t fit in a post — they need room to unfold.

These essays offer more than takes — they offer perspective. Drawing from psychology, lived experience, and cultural insight, each piece explores what it means to be self-aware, emotionally intelligent, and human in a complicated world. Written to make you think, feel, and come back to yourself — not just scroll past.

RJ Starr RJ Starr

The Charisma Paradox: Why Likable People Often Feel Like Impostors

That colleague who lights up the room? They might be faking it harder than you. This essay explores why socially fluent, likable people often feel like impostors—caught between charm and self-doubt. When charisma becomes performance, confidence erodes. Here's what we don’t see behind the smile—and why it matters.

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  • Emotional intelligence isn’t just a workplace skill or buzzword. It's the foundation of how we stay human in an overstimulated world. It’s how we create safety, connection, and clarity in the relationships that matter most.

  • Overthinking is rarely about insight. It’s about emotional avoidance disguised as analysis. True understanding begins not in your thoughts, but in your willingness to stay with what’s uncomfortable without trying to fix or escape it immediately.

  • Self-awareness is not a luxury or a personality trait, it’s a psychological infrastructure. Without it, we repeat patterns, misread situations, and lose the ability to act with intention instead of reaction.

  • Boundaries are not about pushing people away. They’re how we take emotional responsibility for what we can handle, what we value, and how we want to be treated in relationships that actually matter to us.

  • Emotional maturity isn’t measured by how little we feel. It’s shown in how we carry big emotions without letting them hijack our behavior. It’s the quiet strength of presence, not performance.

  • You don’t have to erase your past to heal, you just have to stop letting it silently write the present. Healing is a return to authorship over your life, not a denial of what shaped you.

  • Clarity often feels like calm. Not because everything is perfect, but because you’re no longer performing, pretending, or explaining yourself to people who never learned how to listen with care.

  • Self-trust is not about always knowing the answer. It’s about knowing you can stay present, even when you don’t. It’s a psychological anchor in a world that rewards dissociation and speed.

  • When we can name what we’re feeling without shame, we begin to reclaim agency over our inner life. Language is a psychological bridge between experience and understanding; it lets us carry what we used to avoid.

  • You are not “too much.” You are simply carrying the emotional weight of people who never learned to sit with discomfort, so they handed it to you instead.