There’s something funny about how everyone talks about sex like it’s meant to be effortless. We’ve built this entire culture around being confident and ‘owning it’, but nobody ever mentions how utterly mortifying it can feel to be that exposed – literally and emotionally. You can read every think piece about empowerment, listen to every podcast about confidence, and still find yourself lying there overthinking the angle of your arm.

People love to talk about sex like it’s all about chemistry, but half the time it’s about choreography. Trying to look natural while your brain is quietly screaming, “is that my stomach folding like that? should I move? do I look weird? oh my god, why is there so much eye contact?”. You’re meant to be lost in the moment, but your mind is conducting a full-blown self-evaluation. It’s not even insecurity in the dramatic sense, it’s more subtle like a background app that never stops running.

No one warns you how much mental energy it takes to be comfortable with someone when you’re not even comfortable with yourself. We’re told confidence is sexy but the truth is, confidence is fragile. It’s something you can fake until someone gets close enough to see the cracks, and intimacy is basically a magnifying glass. You can spend all week feeling good about yourself and then suddenly the thought of someone seeing you undressed sends you straight back to being fifteen and mortified in a school changing room.

It’s not just about bodies, though. Insecurity sneaks into every corner of intimacy, the emotional kind included. There’s the worry that you’re not enough, or that you’ll somehow do it wrong, or that you’re being compared to some mysterious ex who probably lived in the gym. You start overthinking your reactions: do you seem too into it? not into it enough? should you be more vocal? less vocal?. Suddenly, what’s meant to be connection becomes performance, and you’re the star of a show you didn’t audition for.

And the irony is that everyone is thinking the same thing. Everyone’s scared of being judged. Everyone’s hyperaware of something. But no one actually says it out loud, because we’ve all been conditioned to think insecurity kills the vibe. As if admitting you’re nervous or self-conscious somehow ruins the magic. But maybe the real magic happens when you stop pretending you’re not terrified.

There’s this unspoken idea that being sexually confident means never having doubts, when in reality, confidence is more like tolerance – the ability to exist with your insecurities without letting them ruin the moment. You don’t have to feel perfect to be present. You just have to stop letting that little voice run the whole operation.

Still, that’s so much easier said than done. When you’ve spent your whole life being fed filtered images of what ‘sexy’ is, it’s hard not to internalise it. We grow up seeing bodies that look airbrushed and effortless and mistake that for the standard. So of course, when real life doesn’t look like that, when there’s awkwardness or imperfect angles or hair in places you didn’t plan for, it throws you off. You start performing confidence instead of feeling it.

It’s wild how insecurity can turn intimacy into a mirror. Not in the literal sense, but in a way that reflects every small thing you dislike about yourself. The stretch marks, the lighting, the way your voice sounds. You start thinking about how you look instead of how you feel. You pull yourself out of the moment without meaning to. It’s like your body’s there, but your mind’s busy doing damage control.

Then there’s the emotional stuff, the quieter insecurities that aren’t about appearance but about being known. Intimacy means letting someone see you when you’re not performing, not pretending, not trying. That’s terrifying. It’s one thing to be seen naked, it’s another to be seen vulnerable. It’s one thing to be touched, it’s another to be understood. You can sleep with someone and still feel completely hidden. You can love someone and still flinch when they really look at you. Because being known means risking being rejected.

And that is the real fear at the heart of it all, isn’t it? Rejection. The idea that if someone sees the full, unfiltered version of you – the body you pick apart, the thoughts you don’t say out loud, the quirks you think are weird – they’ll decide they don’t want it. That’s what makes insecurity so exhausting; it’s not vanity, it’s self-protection. You’re not trying to be shallow, you’re trying to stay safe.

But the problem with that is it keeps you detached. You can’t be fully present in something that requires vulnerability while your brain’s still running a background scan for flaws. You end up missing the connection you actually want because you’re too busy managing the version of yourself you think someone else expects.

There’s something tragic and funny about it at the same time. You can be lying next to someone, physically closer than ever, while mentally miles away. You can be thinking about whether your stomach moved weird when you breathed instead of the actual person in front of you. We talk about being intimate like it’s automatic, but it’s not. It’s an act of bravery, one that most people are faking their way through.

And here’s the real kicker: no one’s immune to it. Even the people who seem confident. Even the ones who talk openly about how ‘comfortable’ they are in their bodies. Everyone has that one thing that makes them want to crawl out of their skin. Everyone has a moment where they suddenly feel fifteen again, awkward and unsure. Confidence isn’t a permanent state. It’s more like a mood – some days you have it, some days you don’t, both is fine.

But we’ve tied so much of our own worth to being desirable that it’s nearly impossible not to link intimacy with validation. You start using it as proof. Proof that you’re wanted, proof that you’re enough. And that’s dangerous territory, because once the high of validation fades you’re left with the same doubts, just louder. You start chasing reassurance through connection, but it never lasts long enough.

It’s strange how something meant to be so natural can feel so staged. You’ll read all these takes about ‘sexual liberation’, but no one admits how heavy that expectation can feel. You’re meant to be confident, empowered, sexy, and chill all at once. You’re meant to look effortless, like you haven’t overthought every possible detail. And when you don’t feel that way, you start wondering if you’re doing it wrong.

The truth is, being secure in intimacy has less to do with what your body looks like and more to do with how much you trust the other person…and yourself. You can have the ‘perfect’ body by every social standard and still feel deeply insecure if you don’t feel emotionally safe. Because intimacy isn’t about being flawless; it’s about being accepted in your flaws.

But saying that out loud feels almost rebellious. We’ve built a world where perfection is normalised and vulnerability is awkward. We joke about bad sex, but we don’t talk about the mental load behind it: the anxiety, the body consciousness, the fear of being too much or not enough. We laugh it off, but deep down everyone’s carrying their own small panic.

There’s something freeing about admitting that, though. Saying that “yeah, sometimes I overthink it. Sometimes I get nervous. Sometimes I feel a bit weird about my body.” It doesn’t make you broken, it makes you honest. And there’s something incredibly human about that honesty. It’s the thing that turns connection from performance into comfort.

We need to normalise the idea that vulnerability is sexy. Not in a cringe way but in the real, raw sense. The kind where you can laugh mid-moment because something awkward happened and it doesn’t ruin anything. The kind where you’re not constantly thinking about how you look, but about how you feel. The kind where you don’t need to perform confidence to be desirable, because being real is the most desirable thing there is.

And humour helps. Honestly, laughing about it makes it lighter. The more you can joke about the awkward bits, the less control insecurity has over you. The first time you admit “that was kind of awkward”, and the other person laughs instead of judging you, something in you unclenches. You realise most of the fear lives inside your head.

That’s not me saying insecurity ever disappears completely, spoiler alert: it doesn’t. It just gets quieter. You learn to stop letting it narrate everything. You stop hiding behind constant self-awareness. You start to see that the things you’re insecure about are usually the things no one else even notices. You’re too busy zooming in on the details of yourself that everyone else sees as part of the whole picture.

Maybe that’s what growing up actually is: not becoming perfectly confident, but learning to live with your insecurities without giving them centre stage. Learning to trust that being seen, really seen, isn’t something to fear. Because the truth is, intimacy is never flawless. It’s awkward and vulnerable and emotional and real. And that’s exactly what makes it meaningful.

So maybe the point isn’t to feel perfect before you let someone in. Maybe it’s about letting someone in and realising you didn’t need to be perfect at all. Because that whole “how can you love someone else if you don’t love yourself” line is rubbish. You can love, deeply and honestly, even while you’re still figuring yourself out. You can be insecure and still deserving. Maybe you don’t need to be healed to be held, just willing to let someone see you before you’ve got it all together.

— Lilly x

DISCLAIMER: posts like this are not about my personal life. I write from observation, experience, and the things I see people dealing with in general