Have you ever walked into a room and immediately felt that you’ve made a mistake coming there? Not that people don’t want you there but just some unsettling feeling that you don’t belong there that everyone else got a script that you never saw. Some people learn early how to be cool, how to accept whatever life throws at them, but you, not so much. You learn how to shrink, how to remain hidden, how to keep quiet when you want to scream and yeah that takes a lot of courage. You are rarely noticed for who you are. Your quietness is taken for emptiness; You become an easy outline for others to joke about in school. Every joke, every laughter needs some target to land upon, and what’s better target than someone who doesn’t even fight back. And when it happens regularly, you stop wondering why everyone is cruel to you and start wondering what’s wrong with you.
It’s not rocket science, its anxiety, it doesn’t come all at once it grows quietly, slowly. You start replaying conversations in your head, conversations that happened years ago, no one really remembers them anymore except you. You start imagining rooms before entering. You start accepting the rejection you will receive when you enter. You hide pieces of yourself so there’s less for them to judge

“Owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we’ll ever do.”
~ Brené Brown
The Gifts of Imperfection

You don’t fear other people, it’s not that, instead you distrust yourself. Your body, your face, your personality everything becomes the target for you to hate, and yes it all seems very logical, very rational it helps you stay small and helps you isolate yourself. And you call it survival. 

How do you fix it?

How do you fix something that has learned to break itself in a quiet room? It’s not about accepting the past, moving on or even forcing confidence on yourself. It starts with accepting yourself as a human. It’s not about performance it’s about permission. Permission for you to make mistakes. Permission to stop blaming yourself for what you were forced to adapt to. You thought survival meant accepting what people thought about you and keeping quiet when they said you were the odd one. But instead, survival meant accepting the flaws, not as verdicts, but as proof of being human in a world that only rewards sameness. You were never incompetent, you were cautious. You were never too quiet; you were just sensitive. The problem was never that you were different. It was that no one taught you how to be different safely.
You don’t owe anyone anything, you are not entitled to being same as others. You are not supposed to give the world a version of yourself that they accept, but you are supposed to be honest with yourself. Some days you will still feel anxiety, you will still feel like you’re the odd one, and you will still struggle, but struggling doesn’t mean you’re weak or pathetic. It means you’re trying and that counts, it counts a big deal. 

And maybe you’ll always carry some of that quiet with you. Maybe that’s not a flaw. Maybe it’s evidence that you learned how to listen before you learned how to speak. And maybe you’ll be afraid sometimes and always imperfect, but you won’t disappear. You won’t abandon yourself. You won’t blend in to survive. And even if they never hold you, you will choose yourself. And that choice is not loud, not at all perfect, but it is enough to keep you whole.