I grew up being told I was too sensitive and I spent the next twenty-five years building an entire personality around not reacting. Now I'm the person everyone calls steady and nobody calls close, and I can trace the distance in every relationship I have back to a single word a teacher used when I was nine. - Silicon Canals

I grew up being told I was too sensitive and I spent the next twenty-five years building an entire personality around not reacting. Now I'm the person everyone calls steady and nobody calls close, and I can trace the distance in every relationship I have back to a single word a teacher used when I was nine. - Silicon Canals

Briefly

"Most people assume emotional steadiness is a sign of health. A steady colleague, a steady partner, a steady friend: these are compliments. We treat composure as evidence that someone has their life together. But what if some of that composure is actually a scar?"

"When you're nine, you don't have the cognitive architecture to evaluate an adult's feedback. You just absorb it. A teacher calls you 'sensitive' in front of a classroom and the word doesn't land as description. It lands as diagnosis."

"A nine-year-old who gets labelled 'too sensitive' doesn't develop thicker skin. They develop a strategy. The strategy is: stop showing what you feel, because showing what you feel gets you singled out."

"The next twenty-five years are a quiet renovation. You don't tear down the original structure. You just build over it, layer by layer, until nobody can see what's underneath."