You Leave the Conversation Your Mind Doesn’t

You know what happens when you stop caring so much about what people think?

Nothing, at first.

It doesn’t disappear overnight and you still catch yourself doing it because you’ve been doing it for so long.

You walk away from a conversation and ten minutes later you’re back in it again. You hear yourself say something and the next second you’re already beating yourself up for saying it. You start making little promises to yourself that you forget five minutes later.

As time goes on, it starts happening less, but little things still show up.

No reply. A weird look. Silence where a laugh should be.

Then somebody asks you something and it’s gone.

And that’s ok.

Your brain just gets tired of carrying things that never really belonged to you.

Most people aren’t thinking about you nearly as much as you imagined. They’re busy with their own day. The same way you are now.

That’s probably the biggest difference. Your day doesn’t keep getting interrupted by thoughts that don’t actually lead anywhere.

You say what you want to say and leave it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Some people were never going to like you anyway, but life keeps moving either way.

So there isn’t some big fanfare where you suddenly become confident.

One day you just realize you haven’t spent the whole afternoon replaying a five minute conversation.

Then it happens again a few days later.

After that, you don’t really think about it anymore.