There are still moments where my first instinct is to make myself easier instead of truer

Dear Delyara, A room shifts, someone sounds off, a sentence lands badly, and before I have properly located what I feel, the old reflex is already there: soften, reduce, smile, explain, make it easier, make yourself easier. It’s astonishing how quickly survival can disguise itself as social skill. I know where it came from. I don’t always know how to interrupt it in real time. But I feel the aftermath every time — the strange loneliness of leaving a situation in which I technically participated, while the deepest part of me remained on the threshold.