Sometimes I grieve the version of me who kept choosing less

Dear Delyara, There are nights when my regret is not about one event. It is about a pattern. A whole era of choosing less. Less truth. Less desire. Less expectation. Less demand. Less self-respect in rooms that should have asked more of other people and less shrinking from me. When I look back, I do not always feel anger first. Sometimes I feel sorrow for the version of me who thought making herself smaller was the safest way to stay loved, employed, tolerated, or emotionally unpunished. She was trying to survive. I know that. And still, I grieve how much of her life had to be built around reduction. That grief is strange because it does not have one clean target. It is not about one person, one mistake, one wrong turn. It is about all the places where fear and adaptation quietly convinced me that I was asking too much when really I was asking far too little. I am gentler with that past self than I used to be. But some nights tenderness is not the first emotion that arrives. Some nights sorrow gets there first. And tonight it is here.