Shrinking becomes muscle memory.
At first, it feels like strategy.
You lower your tone before entering certain rooms.
You soften your conclusions.
You pre-edit your clarity.
You compress your presence into something easier to digest.
You call it maturity.
You call it professionalism.
You call it wisdom.
But over time, it stops being strategy.
It becomes structure.
Your nervous system learns that visibility equals exposure.
Exposure equals risk.
Risk equals consequence.
So expansion begins to feel dangerous.
Not because it is.
But because you were trained to associate your full size with punishment.
Conditioning does not always look violent.
Sometimes it looks like being “guided.”
Sometimes it looks like being advised to be careful.
Sometimes it looks like being told you are intense, emotional, intimidating, too sharp, too observant, too much.
So you shrink.
You shrink to remain employable.
You shrink to remain chosen.
You shrink to remain unflagged.
You shrink to remain safe.
And eventually, the shrinking feels automatic.
Until something disrupts it.
Until breath deepens without permission.
Until posture corrects itself.
Until your language stops apologizing.
That moment feels reckless.
Your heart accelerates.
Your body scans for fallout.
Your thoughts prepare for backlash.
Growth feels like danger.
But what you are feeling is not danger.
You are feeling unfamiliar expansion.
You are feeling muscles you were told not to use.
You are feeling oxygen in places that have been compressed for years.
The problem is not that you are growing.
The problem is that growth destabilizes systems built on your compliance.
Compliance is predictable.
Compliance is containable.
Compliance is easy to document.
Expansion is not.
In Audit of the Slam, I examine what happens when a person stops fitting the narrative written about them.
What I am learning now is this:
The most radical shift does not happen publicly.
It happens internally.
It happens the first time you decide your full presence is not a liability.
It happens the first time you let your certainty stand.
It happens the first time you do not reduce yourself in advance.
Expansion is not chaos.
It is reclamation.
It is the body remembering its design.
It is the mind refusing containment.
It is the spirit rejecting smallness.
And the danger you feel?
That is not proof you should contract.
It is proof you are no longer rehearsing disappearance.
I will not confuse growth with threat again.