Keep Me Out of Your Box: Why you keep shrinking yourself

Welcome to the first Blog/transcript for Keep Me Out of Your Box.

As a recap: The podcast is about building inner validation and protecting your peace. This is a space for learning how to validate yourself from the inside out. For those of you who have been shrinking yourself, softening your edges, or hiding parts of you, just to stay palatable.

This episode is for you. This podcast is for you. And this blog is definitely for you.

There's this moment in your life where you realize, I've been editing myself for people who wouldn't even show up for me, and then it hits you. The version of you that keeps the peace is exhausted. You didn't become small on purpose. You became small because somewhere along the way, you learned that your truth was too loud for certain people.

Who do you feel yourself shrinking around the most? And what do you notice happening in your body when you're with them?

I mean, I personally have been in spaces where speaking up feels wrong. Speaking up feels like something you're going to get in trouble for, and that to be heard is a privilege. Being in those spaces, they start to deteriorate you. They start to make you think about what you need to be or who you need to be to have the privilege of being heard.

So, this podcast is about not caring about that and overcoming that feeling or that thought process. If it's something that has built up over years or something that you're just now starting to see, decide whether or not you want to continue to be in those situations or those environments, or if you wanna find an environment that better suits you.

Shrinking usually begins in one of three places. Someone told you your real self was too much. You learned conflict was dangerous, or you were praised more for being agreeable than expressive. So you adapted. You made yourself softer, smaller, safer, not because it was natural, but because it felt necessary.

But your worth is internal, not assigned. Other people create boxes because it makes you easier for them. But you're not here to shrink for someone's comfort. Here's the truth. No one wants to admit that shrinking feels comfortable until it starts to suffocate you. You lose your voice, you lose your intuition.

You lose the version of you that was meant to take up space. When you shrink, you're not protecting others. You're abandoning yourself.

What version of me shows up around them, and what version of me never gets to be seen? What am I afraid would happen if I stopped shrinking around this person? These are things that I think about when I interact with anyone now. Um, these are things that I journal about, constantly.

It helps me to kind of navigate the social aspects of life because it's not as easy as people think, and as you get older, it gets harder. Everything feels like a game and nothing feels quite as genuine as it used to be when you were younger. But here's the part that matters most. You don't evolve by becoming a new version of yourself.

You evolve by remembering who you were before the world tried to convince you otherwise. Your bigness isn't a threat. Your truth isn't a problem, and your boundaries aren't an obstacle. They're the beginning of your liberation. And your value is not a group project. I feel like I'm defined by who I am, not by who others want me to be.

And I encourage you to think of a time or remember a specific moment where you realized you were making yourself smaller to keep someone else comfortable. What happened?

You don't owe anyone the smaller version of you. The only person you are responsible for honoring is the one you've been suppressing.

If this resonated with you, stay with me. We're just getting started. I, you know, everything starts a little bit slow, but I am confident that together, I can help build a community of people who just want to refine themselves to get all the things they want in this life. It's not about waking up. I think it's more about just deciding to be who you are, fully, thoroughly, all the time, and still thriving in your environment. Thriving in the spaces that you enjoy being in.

Somewhere along the way, you might've learned that your bigness was a threat. Today, we're gonna start unlearning it. If you wanna answer any of these questions or talk to me, give me something that I could talk more about. I love to talk. I think that this is a great outlet for me, and I hope that it becomes something bigger. I don't want to just talk to myself.

So I'd love to hear from people. I am going to start including a listener form in the show notes, so you guys can share with me about a moment (anonymously or not), a time you were shrinking yourself or someone else. I would love to be able to share responses on the podcast.

I know negative feedback is inevitable, but I would like to encourage positive feedback to be just as inevitable. Welcome to the show.