I nearly came to blows with a taxi driver last weekend. This isn’t a regular thing for me. I’ll explain: I’d come back from a trip and had a lot of bags. Rushing to get into the cab, to not hold up the queue, I’d forgotten to take my rucksack off my back. I sat down and panted my address. “TAKE THE RUCKSACK OFF!” the driver yelled through the hole in the Perspex.

I hurriedly pulled the rucksack off, hot-cheeked. And then I did something I would never normally do. I leaned forward and said: “Listen, you may well have a point, but there are ways to speak to a person, and if you’re going to continue to talk to me like that you can stop right here because I am getting out.” I sat back. We stopped at a red light. We sat in silence.

Then, a remarkable thing happened. He apologised. “You’re right,” he said. “There are ways to say it. I was wrong.” I exhaled, and we ended up having a pleasant conversation about the Peak District (where I’d just been). When we reached my flat, he helped me out and I gave him a tip. As I watched him drive away, I felt a sense of success.

As I say, this was atypical. I’m more the kind of person who’s afraid to put her seatbelt on once the journey has started, in case the taxi driver takes it as a negative critique of their driving. I have always been a people-pleaser. On a solo trip around New Zealand in my early 20s, I was so afraid of offending a couple who befriended me on a ferry and insisted on giving me a bed for the night (I know, I know) that I ended up back at their house, having dinner next to a stuffed grizzly bear dressed as Elvis. It towered over the table, its claws painted purple with nail polish. “Emma,” I said to myself, quite sure I was going to be murdered in my bed: “You really have to learn how to say ‘No thanks’.”

This year, as I approach 40, I’m trying to be more authentic. Braver. Bolder. Less fearful of being judged. I’ve worried so much about people’s opinions of me that I have forgotten who I am beyond who they want me to be. It’s not just how I talk to people in the flesh. It’s the way I send emails. It’s the way I feel on social media. My life has been riddled with self-doubt and a fear of speaking my mind, in case it leads to rejection. I’m calling time on this.

This idea came to a head as I watched the TV series Feud (still available on iPlayer), about 1940s screen icons Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, and their fractious relationship. It’s beautifully styled and the acting is phenomenal: Jessica Lange plays Crawford, and Susan Sarandon plays Davis. But I found myself deeply affected by Sarandon’s Davis – the whisky-swigging, foul-mouthed, kick-ass old broad who refuses to kowtow to Hollywood PR sheen or female stereotypes. She is the very opposite of a people-pleaser. She is the archetypal giver-of-zero-fs.

She inspired me. What would my life be like if I tried to Be More Bette? I decided to give it a go.

That taxi ride was just the start. When I got out, I was snarked at by a pair of men outside my building, who pointed at my bags. “Funny time of year for a holiday in Brighton, isn’t it?” I might normally have laughed that off. Instead I said: “I live here, smart-arse.” I didn’t turn to see their reaction. I did expect them to throw something at my head, but otherwise I was doing well.

Part of being Bette is, it seems, not looking back – literally or metaphorically. I have known women, my beloved great-aunt being one, who would go full Bette of an evening – bossing people around, sitting on tables to tell stories, stealing drinks – and then get home, regret it (for which read sober up) and the next morning ring everyone to apologise. You’d have to console her, which was always worse (duller; more time-consuming) than anything she’d said or done. No, the trick to being Bette was to have no regrets, to not succumb to the 3am fear, the social-postmortem anxiety. As Davis wrote in her autobiography, The Lonely Life: “To look back is to relax one’s vigil.”

So, eyes on the horizon, the following day I went to a yoga class. I’ve only been twice before and it is a very established group; I feel like an infiltrator (also I’m not very good at yoga). The previous week I took someone else’s mat by mistake and she gave me daggers the whole class. This time, I was ready. I went on the mat again. She came and stood by me. I wish I could tell you I said something whip-smart and ice-cool – but someone beat me to it. Another member of the class, a dazzling woman, 5ft nothing and pushing 70, clad in glittery black Lycra, drawled: “Come on, Julie, let her have that one, life is too short to have your own yoga mat.” Slam dunk; the mat-owner moved away and the class began. I had been out-Bette’d, that much was clear, but I marvelled at the result.

As we stretched into the first downward dog, the glittery woman started making cracks about her upcoming hip op and I wondered whether I could ever be like that: speak my mind and then merrily carry on, unfazed. I cannot bear the idea of being disliked, and in this area, Davis has much to teach me. “It is better to be hated for who you are than to be loved for someone you’re not,” she writes. “It’s a sign of your worth sometimes, if you’re hated by the right people.” How liberating is that? To be hated as a goal – a bit like a social version of the TV gameshow Pointless.

Easier said than done, though, in the age of social media – that pit of neediness and likability – where the only barometer is the thumbs up or thumbs down from the crowd – or worse, silence. I’ve met some wonderful people on there, but had some grim times, too. I’ve withdrawn from a lot of it in recent years. I couldn’t cope with Facebook (I lost days in there – actual days), and I reached a point on Twitter and Instagram where everything I posted made me anxious. Properly anxious, in a heart-poundy, adrenaline-rush, fight-or-flight kind of way. In a way, it was exciting. Energising, even. (I wondered whether it could somehow count as cardio.) But it was also tiring. And my motivations were off. I wasn’t doing it to connect, to learn, to share, not really. I was doing it to be liked. Realistically, Bette Davis wouldn’t be on social media at all (or wear a rucksack, for that matter), yet she was a massive narcissist, so maybe she wouldn’t be able to resist.

Five days into being more Bette, I post a picture of myself on Instagram with what I think is a genius caption. As soon as it is on there, I decide it is stupid. I am filled with self-loathing. Is it too late to take it down? Will anyone notice? People start liking it. I exhale. Then, someone I do not know, a new follower, leaves a comment. It is the emoji of a person walking, with the word “bye”. I am outraged. What’s up with her? I am tempted to click on her avatar and see what she is like, to try to find something to make me feel better about the fact she has unfollowed me. Old me would have gone down that rabbit hole. But Bette says: “Screw that loser. Who kisses off with an emoji, anyway?” I delete the comment because I don’t want it sitting there as a reminder, but I don’t pursue it. When my mind flicks to it, I say: “Don’t go there.” It’s CBT, Bette-style.

There is something very indulgent and masochistic about looking to be disliked. And when it comes to the internet: seek self-torture, and ye shall find. But it’s not always easy to be strong; being tough behind the front feels like a lifelong work in progress.

I think back to an encounter with an actor I met at a party a few years ago. She spoke to me in a way that wasn’t exactly rude, but let me know that my opinion didn’t matter to her. It was late in the evening, and the karaoke had come out. “So,” I said, good-humouredly. “Are you going to have a go?” She levelled me with a caustic stare. “Darling, I get paid to go onstage. I’m not doing it for free.” She was 100% serious. Wow. So Bette! I was half-horrified, half-awed.

If I were being more Bette back then, my retort could have been: “Sweetie, this isn’t a stage; it’s someone’s living room. Wind it in.” But I just marvelled at her gall. I didn’t judge her, just found it fascinating. I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt. Our idea of ourselves isn’t always the same thing we project. I have a friend – a very successful, outwardly confident friend – who says she can have a bad day, “if the bus driver looks at her funny”. The brashest person at a party is often the most insecure. Wisecracks can be smoke and mirrors.

Still, there is a fine line between having more front and being rude or dismissive. As my friend Dolly says: “What if your authentic self is a dick?” Isn’t there something to be said for tact and reticence, sometimes?

I ask my friend Katie – a total Bette, a straight-talker, and definitely not a dick – for her take. She tells me that being badly bullied at school meant she had to learn from an early age to get validation from herself rather than other people. “My confidence comes partly from a bloody-minded solipsism, and having come to terms very early with a number of things. I knew I wasn’t ever going to be liked by everyone – because nobody liked me,” she says.

There’s an echo of this in Davis’s autobiography when she writes: “I have always been driven by some distant music – a battle hymn no doubt – for I have been at war since the beginning.” Davis’s father left when she was small and she had a difficult journey to Hollywood – rejected for her own screen tests and used as an extra in others, including one where 15 men lay on top of her, one after the other, to practise their passionate kiss. On Davis’s crypt, at Forest Lawn memorial park in Los Angeles, there is a 6ft tall Roman statue of a woman standing on a marble sarcophagus, above the words: “Bette Davis. She did it the hard way.”

After seven days of channelling Bette, I arrive at a photography studio to be transformed into the woman herself. I sit down and look in the mirror. Can I look like her? I don’t even look like me at the moment. I had a baby a year ago and feel as if I haven’t slept properly for 14 months. Morag the makeup artist – a total Bette – works her magic. I stare at my over-drawn red lips, straight across the top with no dip, a slash of attitude, my fierce brows, begging to be raised, sardonically. I understand the meaning of the term warpaint. “Are you allergic to anything?” Morag asks. “No,” I answer instinctively. Then I say: “I’m just trying to think what Bette Davis would say in response to that.” Morag thinks for a moment. Then she says: “Joan Crawford.” Ha! Out-Bette’d again.

Throughout the day, I have a few work emails to deal with. I consider my words carefully as I type. I try to be straight up, to not ponder or obsess or agonise. I try to use fewer of those little modifying words, such as “maybe” and “possibly”, that women so often use to make themselves more palatable; less demanding, but also uncertain, apologetic. I feel inspired to own the situation instead of shuffling to fit in to it, to ask for what I want. If you don’t get it, forget it and move on. I send the emails and click my phone to sleep. Every time my mind tries to go to the emails, I tell it: don’t even go there. I relax and get my swagger on.

The shoot is a hoot. There are some things I don’t want to do (wear a skirt, for example), and I stand my ground pleasantly and… it’s fine. Everyone is cool. There, see? I tell myself. I realise that the really difficult thing isn’t dealing with people who sling shit; it’s dealing with people I like when they ask me for things I can’t give but feel obliged to. I don’t have the grammar for that.

I’m working on this across the board. When I got married recently, my husband and I wrote our own vows. One of them was: “To communicate fully and fearlessly.” It’s an ongoing challenge, but a crucial one. I’m making a few vows to myself this year, too. To always admire kick-ass women, but to love and accept the other side of myself: the oversensitive overthinker who remains porous to the world. Some flaws are strengths in disguise. To feel less, to lose sensitivity, would be to experience only half of life – just as worrying too much eats up precious time.

I leave my makeup on to go home on the train. Before the mask slips, I find myself in one last situation to handle, Bette-style. It soon becomes clear that, across the carriage, there is that most challenging of fellow passengers: the interminable sniffer. A man eating a tub of melon is sniffing loudly every five seconds. A guttural sniff. A productive sniff. My face twists into a Bette frown. In the seat opposite me, a woman has stopped reading her book, similarly grossed out. We exchange a look. She puts her headphones in. Alas, I have no such luxuries, and the journey is an hour long. After a few more minutes of the grotesque sniffing, I pull a pack of tissues out of my bag and proffer them in the man’s direction. I say: “Would you like a tissue?” Sure, it’s slightly more passive-aggressive than: “Can you stop sniffing, please?”, but it’s the best I can do. The woman hides her face behind her book. The man declines and looks genuinely sorry (it could have gone either way, let’s face it) and pulls out a blue paper hand towel to blow his nose. He doesn’t sniff again.

I try to catch his eye and smile, to let him know I am not a rotter, just someone who spoke her mind and is now getting on with things, but he stares out the window. The woman lowers her book and gives me a secret smile. It is a smile that says: you’re pretty cool. And you know what, for a millisecond, I feel it.

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