There is a version of survival that looks responsible.
It looks quiet.
Measured.
Strategic.
It looks like filing your sharpest observations away because they might make someone uncomfortable.
It looks like diluting your joy because it might attract attention.
It looks like swallowing your juiciest truths because you’ve learned that honesty can cost you safety.
When you spend years doing that, you don’t just become careful.
You become air-restricted.
When you spend years filing away your rawest desires, your sharpest observations, and your juiciest truths, you aren’t just protecting yourself from the world.
You are starving yourself of oxygen.
Staying small doesn’t stop the world from hurting you.
It just ensures that when you are hurt, you’re too constricted to scream.
The system does not only monitor behavior.
It rewards constriction.
It rewards the woman who edits herself before entering the room.
It rewards the woman who pre-softens her language.
It rewards the woman who makes her power digestible.
It calls that maturity.
But oxygen is not immature.
Breath is not dramatic.
Expression is not instability.
There is a difference between survival discipline and self-erasure.
And many of us cross that line long before we realize it exists.
In Audit of the Slam, I write about inspection — the ways institutions document, interpret, and reduce a person into files and conclusions.
But this is about the internal audit.
The one where you have to ask:
How much of me did I archive in order to make other people comfortable?
How much truth did I postpone for later?
How many versions of myself did I mark “too much” before anyone else even had the chance?
You can survive like that.
But you cannot breathe like that.
The nervous system keeps record.
The body keeps evidence.
The lungs do not lie.
There comes a moment where survival is no longer the goal.
Breathing is.
This is not recklessness.
It is restoration.
It is the refusal to die quietly in rooms that never deserved your silence.
The audit is no longer just about what was done to me.
It is about what I consented to shrink.
And I am no longer filing myself away.