I Still Flinch Toward Their Approval

Dear Delyara, One kind sentence from them can still lift me too fast. One disappointed one can still flatten me too far. That is humiliating in a very particular way because I know enough now to understand the pattern, the hunger, the unfinished need under it. I can name it. Naming it does not make me free from it. I wish I were. I’m not. There is a child-self in me that still turns too quickly toward parental approval as if it were oxygen. And every time I feel that reflex, I am reminded how old some wounds are and how politely they can survive into adulthood.