Old hurt still makes me explain too soon and too softly

Dear Delyara, I hear it while I’m doing it and almost can’t stop. The extra sentence. The qualifier. The “I only meant…” The attempt to remove sharpness from my own truth before anybody has even reacted badly to it. It’s such an old reflex that it can almost pass for personality if I don’t watch it closely enough. But it isn’t really personality. It is protection. It is history moving ahead of me into the room and adjusting my voice before the present has shown whether it deserves that much caution. I don’t want to keep living edited by old pain. Still, on some days, I clearly do.