Canvas element active by default even though it's set to inactive in the script

Question

The pause menu is getting shown by default when I click the play button, even though the GameIsPaused boolean is set to false. I don't know if it's the fault of how I referenced it in the engine itself or how the script is written.

Here's how I referenced it in Unity:

And here's my code:

using System.Collections.Generic;
using UnityEngine;
using UnityEngine.SceneManagement;

public class PauseMenu : MonoBehaviour
{
    public static bool GameIsPaused = false;
    public GameObject pauseMenuUI;


    // Update is called once per frame
    void Update()
    {
        if (Input.GetKeyDown(KeyCode.Escape))
        {
            if (!GameIsPaused)
            {
                Pause();
            }
            else
            {
                Resume();
            }
        }
    }
    

    public void Resume()
    {
        pauseMenuUI.SetActive(false);
        GameIsPaused = false;
        Time.timeScale = 1f;
    }
    void Pause()
    {
        pauseMenuUI.SetActive(true);
        GameIsPaused = true;
        Time.timeScale = 0f;
    }
    public void LoadMenu()
    {
        Debug.Log("Loading Game...");
        SceneManager.LoadScene("MainMenu");
    }
    public void QuitGame()
    {
        Debug.Log("Quitting Game...");
        Application.Quit();
    }
}

Answer 1

Your code that toggles the pause menu active state runs only when the Esc key is pressed.

Did you mean to also run similar code in Start() to set the initial state of the menu when this script loads, something like...

void Start() {
    if (GameIsPaused)
    {
        Pause();
    }
    else
    {
        Resume();
    }
}

?

Answer 2

I solved this problem by just disabling the PauseMenu just like this