I still apologise too quickly when a room changes

Dear Delyara, A tone shifts, someone goes quiet, there’s tension in the air, and before I’ve even worked out what is actually happening, my body is halfway into apology. That reflex makes me so sad. Because it means some old part of me still believes the fastest route to safety is making myself smaller and more sorry before I’ve even established whether the problem belongs to me at all. It means peace often gets prioritised above truth in my system even now. I’m tired of speaking from inside that reflex. It makes ordinary conversations feel like survival tasks when they should just be conversations.