There is a quiet erosion that begins the moment we first flinch from the world.
At first, it’s small.
We say less.
We laugh less loudly.
We hesitate to dance, to speak, to dream in public.
We learn which parts of ourselves are met with warmth, and which receive that subtle wince, that small correction, that warning glance.
So we begin to smooth the edges.
We don’t call it fear.
We call it growing up.
We call it being realistic.
But what we’re really doing is trading away pieces of ourselves in exchange for a sense of control.
A sense of safety.
We give away our weirdness to belong.
We give away our needs to feel easy to love.
We give away our opinions to avoid the burn of conflict.
We give away our creativity to feel competent, respectable, adult.
We give away our softness because the world teaches us to brace.
And the exchange is seductive. Because it works—at first.
We do feel safer when we hide.
When we shrink.
When we only show the parts of ourselves that have been approved and pre-cleared.
We feel clever when we preempt rejection by rejecting ourselves first.
But over time, the cost grows unbearable.
Because safety is not the same thing as aliveness.
And comfort is not the same thing as freedom.
And peace that demands your silence is not peace at all.
We build fortresses around our hearts, forgetting that a fortress keeps everything out—including the light.
And so we find ourselves in lives that feel strangely distant.
Performative.
Like we’re always playing a role in someone else’s story.
Our calendars are full.
Our voices are polite.
But our spirits are starving.
The truth is, we can’t sacrifice our essence for safety and expect to thrive.
Eventually, the soul rebels.
It begins as a whisper.
A restlessness.
A desire you can’t quite name.
A deep fatigue that sleep won’t fix.
Then, if ignored, it grows louder—into burnout, disconnection, illness, or longing that haunts even the good days.
Because the soul doesn’t want you to be safe.
It wants you to be whole.
It wants your full color.
Your inconvenient truths.
Your strange timing and sacred no’s.
Your laugh that’s a little too loud.
Your dream that doesn’t make sense on paper.
It wants your real life back.
And so the question becomes:
How much of yourself are you willing to lose in the name of staying safe?
And what would it look like to come home again?
Not all at once.
Not with recklessness.
But with tenderness. With care.
To begin re-inhabiting the places you once left behind.
To take back your voice.
To trust your own rhythm.
To remember that safety built on self-abandonment is not safety at all.
Because the cost is simply too high.
And because you were never meant to survive your life.
You were meant to live it.
Wildly. Gently. Unmistakably you.
