“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.”
——E.E. Cummings, A Miscellany
I used to rehearse my opinions before saying them out loud — softening them, hedging, adding “but I could be wrong” to things I was pretty sure about. I thought that was humility. A friend called it something else once, casually, over tacos: “You do this thing where you pre-apologize for having a point of view.” I laughed it off. I thought about it for weeks.
The work of having an unedited version of myself show up in a conversation is still ongoing. Some days I catch the hedge mid-sentence and drop it. Some days I don’t. But I’ve started noticing when I’m performing easy instead of being honest, which turns out to be the first step.
Being yourself isn’t passive. It’s a small daily decision made against some pressure — one conversation at a time.