monday, stop shrinking to fit

Monday, May 18, 2026

Today:

• the slow habit of making yourself smaller so other people feel comfortable, and what it is quietly costing you.
• a composer who kept apologizing for his own work until one night he stopped, and what changed the moment he did.
• Reflect, a journaling tool that turns five minutes into actual self-knowledge instead of a blank page stare.
• one thing to say out loud today that you have been keeping to yourself.

I caught myself doing something embarrassing at dinner last week. A friend asked what I had been working on and I said "oh, just some writing stuff" and changed the subject. I am a writer. It is not a hobby. I do not know why I said "just." But I did. And I noticed it about thirty seconds later, too late to go back.

Your perception^

Think of the last time you downplayed something you actually care about. Not out of modesty, but out of something closer to fear. What were you trying to avoid by making yourself smaller in that moment?

There is a particular kind of self-erasure that does not look like low confidence from the outside. It looks like humility. It looks like being easy to be around. You qualify your opinions. You say "I think, but I could be wrong" when you are not actually unsure. You describe your work with language that invites people not to take it too seriously, just in case they were not going to anyway.

It feels protective. And it is. But the protection has a price.

Because every time you shrink a little, you train yourself to believe the shrinking is appropriate. That this is the right size for you. That taking up more space would be somehow rude, or arrogant, or asking for trouble.

A friend of mine once told me she spent three years describing her business as "a little side project" at parties. It employed four people at the time. She was not lying exactly. She was just pre-emptively apologizing for it. Pre-empting a judgment that might never have come.

The question is not whether you have confidence or not. The question is: what specifically are you afraid will happen if you stop apologizing for yourself?

"You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better."
Anne Lamott

Your acceleration^

In 1902, a Finnish composer named Jean Sibelius premiered his second symphony in Helsinki. The audience gave it a standing ovation. Critics compared it to Beethoven. By any measure, it was a triumph.

Sibelius spent the next two decades apologizing for it. In letters, in conversations, to anyone who would listen. He called it too emotional. Too obvious. He worried that people who praised it had simply been fooled. He started a seventh symphony and then an eighth. The eighth was almost finished. He destroyed it. He destroyed years of work because he could not bear the idea of people comparing it unfavorably to the second, the one he had never quite forgiven himself for loving.

He lived to ninety-one. The last thirty years of his life, he wrote almost nothing. He called the silence "the silence of the forest." His friends called it something else.

What is strange is that the second symphony is genuinely one of the most beautiful pieces of music written in the twentieth century. Sibelius knew this. He had felt it when he wrote it. But the gap between what he knew it was and what he was willing to claim for it turned into a wall he could not get past.

He was not destroyed by failure. He was destroyed by refusing to stand behind his own best work.

Where in your life are you doing the same thing? Building something real, then immediately stepping back from it so no one can accuse you of thinking too highly of yourself?

Your move^

Try Reflect (reflect.app) for five minutes today. It is a private journaling tool built around connected notes, but ignore the fancy features. Just open it and answer one question: what is something I am currently doing well that I have not admitted to anyone, including myself? Write three sentences. That is it. The goal is not insight. The goal is practice, saying the true thing without immediately softening it. You will feel the urge to add "but I still have a long way to go." Notice that urge. Then do not type it.

Your destination^

Today, at some point, you will have a chance to describe yourself or your work to another person. It might be a casual question at lunch, a message, a quick call. Before you reach for the qualifier, the "just," the "only," the "kind of" -- pause for one second.

Then say the true version. Not the inflated version. Not the performance. The actual, honest, unshrunken version.

What is one thing you are doing or building right now that you have been describing with smaller words than it deserves, and what would you call it if you were not worried about how it sounded?

Floyd

P.S. "Just some writing stuff." I am going to stop saying that. This is the first step.