I can still feel myself becoming smaller in certain family rooms

Dear Delyara, It happens before thought. A tone, a question, a certain style of interruption, and suddenly my voice changes. I become more careful, more polite, more edited, less certain of my own reactions. The adult version of me does not disappear, but she stops leading. That’s what old family patterns do. They wait underneath the surface until one small cue wakes them, and then your body starts answering history before your mind has finished hearing the present. I come home from those visits tired in ways that don’t make sense if you only count the hours. But the body counts more than hours. It counts what role it had to become in order to survive the room.