They just said my name. Not angry, not loud. Just my name, and I felt my shoulders tighten before I even understood why. It wasn’t the sound of it, but the way it landed, like a small stone dropped into a still pond, the ripples reaching far beyond the initial splash. I remember pulling back slightly, lowering my voice, waiting longer before speaking again. No one told me to do that. I learned it.
Some lessons don’t arrive as harm. They slink in as corrections, small enough to ignore but significant enough to alter your course. The body remembers. Like how I learned to modulate myself, reading rooms faster than my own mind, softening truths to keep the peace, to maintain an atmosphere of calm.
These skills, polished over years, kept me safe. Safe from rejection, safe from standing out too sharply, safe from being too much. But safety has its costs. It taught me something dangerous: that my voice was conditional, that my presence was negotiable, that being myself required constant calibration.
‘Mouthy’ was the word that tried to shrink me. Not because I was loud or brash, but because my presence itself was an affront. The long history many of us live with, being told in a hundred ways that our reactions and truths need editing before they can exist.
I took ‘mouthy’ back. Not as a weapon or a drama. But to let it hold something honest. A reminder that presence itself is a statement, one I no longer feel the need to soften.