The Shape I Was Supposed to Be

They told me to soften my voice,

so I swallowed my words.

They told me to speak more,

so I learned to fill the silence

with sentences I didn't believe.

They told me I was too serious,

so I laughed at jokes

that weren't funny.

They told me I cared too much,

so I practiced pretending

that nothing mattered.

They told me I dreamed too loudly,

so I folded my dreams

into smaller and smaller pieces

until they could fit

inside someone else's pocket.

They said,

Be normal.

I asked,

What does normal look like?

Nobody answered.

They simply pointed

toward everyone else.

So I watched.

I watched how people dressed,

how they talked,

how they smiled,

how long they looked into someone's eyes,

how quickly they answered questions,

how easily they walked into rooms

without wondering

whether they belonged there.

I studied them

as if they were instructions.

And then I practiced.

I changed my clothes.

Changed my hair.

Changed my opinions.

Changed the music I listened to.

Changed the things I talked about.

Changed the dreams I admitted to having.

Changed the parts of myself

that seemed inconvenient

to everyone around me.

Every change earned me

a little approval.

A nod.

A smile.

A compliment.

“You're different now.”

They meant it as praise.

I accepted it as proof

that I was finally becoming enough.

But there was a problem.

Every time someone said

“You're different,”

I felt a little more absent.

I became excellent

at disappearing.

I could enter a room

and immediately understand

what version of myself

people wanted.

With one person,

I was quiet.

With another,

I was funny.

With another,

I was endlessly agreeable.

With another,

I pretended not to care

about the things

I cared about most.

I became a collection

of carefully edited versions

of myself.

And everyone seemed happy.

Everyone except me.

At night,

when the room was quiet

and nobody was watching,

I would finally take off

the invisible costume.

Then I would sit there

wondering who I was

without an audience.

I had spent so much time

learning how to be accepted

that I had forgotten

how to be alive.

I stopped drawing.

Stopped writing.

Stopped asking questions.

Stopped talking about the subjects

that made my eyes light up.

I stopped saying,

“I love this.”

Because someone might say,

“That's weird.”

I stopped saying,

“This matters to me.”

Because someone might answer,

“You take everything too seriously.”

Eventually,

I stopped saying much at all.

And strangely,

the quieter I became,

the more people complained

that I had changed.

“You aren't the same person.”

No.

I wasn't.

You had asked me

to become someone else.

And I had listened.

There is a particular kind of loneliness

that comes from standing in a crowded room

while nobody knows

that you are missing.

I knew that loneliness.

I carried it everywhere.

To dinner.

To work.

To celebrations.

To conversations.

Even home

didn't always feel like home.

Because home is supposed to be

the place where you stop performing.

I had forgotten how.

Then one ordinary morning,

I looked at myself in the mirror

and felt nothing.

Not sadness.

Not anger.

Nothing.

And somehow,

that frightened me more

than sadness ever could.

I asked myself a question

I had avoided for years:

What if I stopped trying

to be enough for everyone?

The answer came quietly.

Maybe I could finally

be enough for myself.

So I began with something small.

I wore the clothes I actually liked.

Nobody died.

I listened to the music

that made me happy.

The world continued turning.

I talked about the things

I was passionate about.

Some people rolled their eyes.

I survived.

I said no

when I wanted to say no.

Some people became disappointed.

I survived that too.

I started writing again.

At first, the words were awkward.

They had been locked away

for so long

they didn't know how to walk.

But eventually

they ran.

Page after page.

Thought after thought.

Feeling after feeling.

I began meeting myself again.

Not the person

I had invented for other people.

The original me.

The unfinished me.

The complicated me.

The person who could be

confident one day

and uncertain the next.

The person who could love deeply

and still need boundaries.

The person who could make mistakes

without becoming a mistake.

I learned something important:

You can spend your entire life

trying to become someone's idea

of a perfect person

and still fail to please them.

Because expectations move.

The moment you reach one,

another appears.

There will always be someone

who thinks you're too loud.

Too quiet.

Too ambitious.

Too emotional.

Too distant.

Too strange.

Too sensitive.

Too much.

And there will always be someone

who doesn't understand you.

That is not proof

that you are broken.

Sometimes it is simply proof

that you are different.

And different is not

the same thing as wrong.

So now,

when someone tells me

I should become less of myself

to make them comfortable,

I listen.

I consider what they mean.

And then I ask myself

a better question:

Do I need to change because I have done something wrong,

or because someone cannot accept who I am?

There is freedom

in knowing the difference.

I am still learning.

Still rebuilding.

Still discovering pieces of myself

I abandoned years ago.

But I no longer want

to become smaller

so someone else can feel bigger.

I don't want to spend

another lifetime

apologizing for taking up space.

I don't want to be

a perfect copy

of someone else's expectations.

I want to be unfinished.

I want to be complicated.

I want to be honest.

I want to be myself

even when myself

is still becoming.

Because perhaps

the greatest tragedy

is not being rejected

for who you are.

Perhaps it is spending so long

trying to be accepted

that you reject yourself first.

And I have done that before.

I won't do it again.