A friend read my last post and said it felt like I’d written it about her. This is her story of the moment she caught herself shrinking and chose something different.
This continues the “Do You Remember Her?” conversation. If you haven’t read the first post, start there. This picks up right where it left off.
The Voice Note
It was a Tuesday night when the voice note came through. My friend, I’ll call her Jane, had just finished reading the first post in this series. The one about the girl we lost somewhere along the way (Do You Remember Her? Reflections for Women). She said she needed to talk before she could think about it too hard.
“It’s like you wrote it about me,” she said, laughing at her own reaction. “Every single line. I don’t even know how to laugh loud anymore. On purpose, I mean. I tried it in my car earlier, just to test it. It felt fake.”
I asked her what she meant. What she told me next stayed with me for days.
The Memory It Stirred
She was maybe nine when it started. She’d asked one honest, curious, child-sized question too many, and someone sighed at her like she was a small inconvenience. Growing up, she was told, again and again, that she talked too much, even when she was just being a child. So she learned to stay quiet to keep the peace.
“Do you think I’m broken?” she asked me.
“No,” I said. “I think you were smart. You solved a real problem with the only tools a child has.”
Shrinking wasn’t weakness. It was a strategy, and it worked until it didn’t know when to stop. A strategy built in someone else’s living room, many years ago, doesn’t stop on its own. It just keeps running quietly in the background of an adult life, long after the danger has left the room. That was the line in the post, she said, that made her put her phone down.
The Sentence She Almost Swallowed
A few days later, we met up, and Jane could barely wait to tell me what happened.
Someone had asked her for a favour she genuinely didn’t have the energy for. Her mouth was already forming the old shape, “Sure, no problem,” before her brain had even weighed in.
And then, for the first time in a while, she caught it mid-air.
“Actually, I can’t this week,” she said instead. No apology stapled on. No excuse to cushion it. Just the plain, true sentence, standing on its own.
She said it felt so strange to say something that simple that she almost laughed afterward. That’s the whole practice, really. Catching the sentence halfway and letting it land differently. You don’t have to overhaul your life. You just need to start paying attention to how you react to things and people around you.
What She’s Learning to Do Instead
Since then, she’s picked one person that she doesn’t need to perform for. When something’s funny, she lets herself laugh the real way now, not the mask she has worn for years. The first few times felt like putting on old clothes that no longer fit. She kept doing it anyway. Slowly, it stopped feeling like a costume.
She’s fully honest that this doesn’t undo years of learning overnight. Some days she still swallows the sentence. But this practice has made her more aware of who she is and what she actually wants.
The goal was never to become loud overnight. It was to catch one sentence before it shrinks, and let it stand.
Your Turn
Before we hung up, Jane asked me the same question the post had asked her. So now I’m asking you: when was the last time you laughed, asked, said no, or took up space the way you would have at eight, before anyone taught you to check yourself first?
You don’t need a perfect answer. Jane didn’t have one either.
Tell me in the comments: where does the shrinking show up most for you? I have a feeling some of us will recognize ourselves in her story.
That little girl Jane used to be, the one who laughed loud and never apologized for taking up space, isn’t gone. She’s just been waiting for Jane to stop shrinking long enough to let her back in.