TL;DR: It's because I internalized from a young age that I shouldn't behave in ways that are considered feminine. Help me unlearn that?

Before puberty, I didn't really care for differences between girls and boys, or whether I belonged to one group or another. However, my family, my culture, and my society at the time kind of silently encouraged me to conform to the gender I was assigned. It was a little bit annoying, because I remember hearing music on the street markets of China and consciously avoiding walking to the beat, because it reminded me of dance, and I had somehow inferred that dancing was a feminine thing to do.

Puberty didn't change much about that; it just made me learn that I liked girls. Naturally, I paid more attention to them than I did to boys, and I remember having to mind that my gait and posture didn't start mirroring theirs (for instance, I was deathly afraid that my hips would start swaying while walking or running). Girls were expressive and animated, so I had to consciously try to be stoic and collected. Despite this, boys at my middle school often wondered if I was gay (for all middle-school intents and purposes, I was straight AF).

I talked about this next part in a previous post here, but as a quick refresher, towards the end of high school, I was cast into a comedic scene group for a competition between theater classes from different schools. In our earliest rehearsals, one group member suggested that all of the characters should be played by people with the opposite gender, which everyone else agreed was especially funny, because the scene revolved around two ridiculous couples (of which I was to play a wife). At first, I objected, because I felt my carefully constructed male ego being challenged, but even when I got past that and warmed up to the idea, my body wasn't letting me move in the ways that I was trying to make it move. My other male group member was hulking and strong, and even his hip pops were much more convincing than mine.

Now, the more I think about it, the more I realize that all the stuff I often did while people were around is pretty masculine: walking around, speaking, how to hold food, hell, I was even afraid to cross my legs the wrong way (says I, as I sit comfortably with them crossed in the "feminine" fashion, lol). But when it came to stuff I did privately - things I didn't have to watch people do or be watched while I did (finding a comfortable position to sleep in, doing personal hygiene, dressing and undressing) - I was much freer to do what felt practical or natural, which sometimes turns out to be what people consider feminine. I'd imagine if I grew up in an alternate reality where people watch each other sleep, my sleeping position would be JFK in this picture but lying down.

The theatrical performer part of me wants to be able to master both masculine and feminine behaviors and comfortably choose how I want to present at any given moment. I think I've got the masculine part down, which to me is basically "be boring". How do I go about learning the exciting part?