I think work is teaching me to make myself smaller

Dear Delyara, That frightens me more than the bad days themselves. A bad day is a day. But the shrinking is cumulative. I can feel it in the way I rehearse emails. In how carefully I edit my own tone before speaking. In how often I choose silence not because I agree, but because I can’t bear spending one more evening carrying the emotional cost of having been direct in the wrong room. The job hasn’t only tired me. It has changed my posture in professional spaces. I do not want to spend years becoming easier to manage at the price of becoming harder to recognise to myself. And yet, some weeks, that feels exactly like what is happening.