Certain moods in a room still make me emotionally disappear before anything is said directly

Dear Delyara, It isn’t always words that do it. Sometimes it’s atmosphere. A tension. A clippedness. A sense that one wrong sentence could change the room. Some people barely notice those climates. I enter them and become smaller without meaning to. My voice gets more careful. My thoughts stop arriving at full size. Part of me shifts from participation to monitoring. That’s how I know some fear is older than the present. Because the present hasn’t yet earned the power it suddenly has over my body. I hate how invisible this is to other people. And I hate how familiar it still is to me.