Series 28: A Life That Learns to Hold Itself Together

Learning to Stand Inside Your Own Decisions Again

You have been living cautiously, choosing gently, and bending just enough to maintain peace. In all that accommodation, you lost the sound of your own voice. You didn’t mean to; nobody does. You force a smile while your body begs for rest, nod to a request even though your "yes" feels like swallowing glass, and dilute your opinion until it vanishes. Each time, you convince yourself that it’s easier this way since it’s more gentle and mature. But those moments accumulate, making it hard to breathe under the pressure of being excessively agreeable.

You struggle to pinpoint when you began living this way. When did your needs become negotiable and everyone else’s become gospel? You cannot remember the actual moment because you faded and dimmed your light gradually. One day, you realized you had been a guest in your own life, tiptoeing around your own truth.

It is your fatigue that finally manages to break through all this, both physically and emotionally. Spiritually, you are tired too. You keep showing everyone a version of yourself that makes them comfortable, while inside, you are becoming more and more hollow. You are sick of explaining over and over again the choices that you ought not to be defending, and you are tired of expecting disappointments and handing over your power to people who do not know the price of your compliance.

Your body remembers the old choreography: automatic apologies, preemptive explanations, and constant calibrating to others’ comfort. You catch yourself mid-sentence, softening things that don’t need softening, and feel the familiar pull to shrink back, to reconsider, or to make yourself smaller so someone else can feel bigger. But this time, you do not.

You let your decision stand, your boundary hold, and you let your truth exist without offering apologies or justifications. Though you disappoint some people, like those who loved your compliance, you do not collapse, and the world does not end. With each honest choice, something clicks back into place. You see the familiar image of yourself, the one who has always been your inner self beneath that well-rehearsed act.

You discover that the version of you who understood your needs, and who knew what was important and had big dreams, has never truly left. That version is still there waiting silently and patiently, holding space for the time when you will stop abandoning yourself for the sake of others. That could be the profound simplicity of this chapter that you are learning to stand inside your own decisions again.

You were never meant to live a life that fits everyone else while you disappear into the margins of your own story. This is your life, these are your choices, and this is your voice, and they all need to matter.

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