There are rooms where I can feel myself becoming less real in order to stay acceptable

Dear Delyara, I know how to do it. That’s the problem. Less direct. Less intense. Less complicated. More polished. More socially digestible. Enough truth to pass for openness, not enough to create genuine risk. People can leave those rooms thinking they know me reasonably well. Meanwhile I leave them with that old, dull private loneliness that comes from having participated without truly arriving. I wish I had a better word for that kind of self-reduction. “Masking” sounds too clinical. “Politeness” sounds too innocent. What it feels like is gradual emotional erasure in exchange for harmony.