There’s a particular kind of anxiety that shows up right at the beginning of things.

An actress named Joleigh Bonds recently shared a funny video called “The reality of simply saying your name during a prescreen.” It captures a moment that feels absurd only because it’s so familiar: standing in front of someone, asked to introduce yourself, and suddenly feeling as though you’ve never said your own name out loud before.

You know how this goes. The thing you’ve done effortlessly your entire life becomes strangely complicated the second you realize you’re being watched.

I once laughed about this exact phenomenon with my agent. We were talking about the anxiety of walking into a room where music is playing — that brief, ridiculous spiral where you wonder, Am I supposed to walk on the beat? Or very deliberately not walk on the beat? The body, which normally handles walking without input, suddenly asks for instructions.

And even when there’s no music at all, the effect is the same. Awareness steps in, and instinct politely exits.

Charles Schulz captured it perfectly in a Peanuts cartoon when Linus says, “Oh, no… I’m aware of my tongue.” The humor lands because it’s true. The moment attention turns inward, the simplest human functions begin to feel oddly manual.

It’s also why Austin Powers’ line — “Allow myself to introduce… myself” — still gets a laugh. We recognize the impulse immediately: the unnecessary over-management of something that never needed managing in the first place.

via GIPHY

This is what happens when we realize we’re being observed. Not judged, necessarily. Just seen.

And that distinction matters.

Most first impressions don’t unravel because we say the wrong thing or walk the wrong way or introduce ourselves incorrectly. They wobble because, for a brief moment, anxiety interrupts instinct. We stop trusting the parts of ourselves that already know how to show up.

The good news is that this moment is almost always temporary.

Given a beat — sometimes literally — the body remembers what it knows. Conversation replaces self-consciousness. Connection nudges out performance. The spell breaks, usually faster than we think.

If there’s a takeaway here, it’s not a trick or a fix. It’s reassurance. That strange, hyper-aware feeling at the beginning of something new isn’t a failure of confidence. It’s simply what happens when being human briefly becomes a conscious act.

And it passes.

Because while you’re wondering what to do with your hands, or your voice, or your name, chances are the person across from you is busy managing their own version of the same thing.