I still go quiet to survive

Dear Delyara, Even in rooms that haven’t earned that version of me. The second a man’s tone changes, or an authority figure gets cold, or a room tightens in that certain familiar way, I can feel my body do the old thing. I get smaller. More polite. More strategic. Less fully there. From the outside, it probably looks like calm. It isn’t calm. It’s adaptation. And I’m tired of how often old fear still gets to decide the size of me in present moments that are not, technically, the past. That’s what trauma does. It rents space in the body long after you thought the lease was over.