You remember what it is to wake to an alarm someone else has set, to move through a day shaped by a time you did not choose, and to promise yourself that one day you would be free of all of it. So you picture leaving, becoming your own boss,

You tell someone about a dream you have been holding onto for a while, maybe over dinner, maybe in the car on the way home, and instead of cheering you on they just look at you and ask, can you do it, and the whole room goes a little quiet,

You told someone you liked them, someone you really cared about, and it did not go the way you hoped, and now you keep playing it back in your head, thinking about what you said and how you looked and what you could have done so it ended differently. Then

You are looking back through old photos from a day out, and you spot yourself in the middle of the group, except you are curled slightly inward, shoulders forward, chin dropped, somehow smaller than everyone beside you. Nobody asked you to shrink, you do not remember choosing to stand that

You send a message and watch them take hours to reply, and when it finally comes you tell yourself you do not mind, that you are easy going, that this is simply how they are. You laugh off the comment that stung. You say you are fine when you are

You walk into a room and you feel it before anyone has even looked at you, that small tightening in your chest, the quiet sense that you have already been measured and come up short. You have gotten good at hiding it by now, good at looking like someone who

You already know what you want to do. You can feel it, the decision has been sitting quietly inside you for weeks, and still you find yourself picking up your phone to ask someone what they think. You message one friend, then another, you bring it up with your family

There is something about you that people have pointed out for years. A friend mentions it gently, your mother mentions it far less gently, and every single time you nod along and change absolutely nothing. It is not that you are stubborn exactly, it is that the words slide off