The First Thing That Goes Is the Quiet
You have spent years being easy to be around. You laughed at the right moments. You didn't bring up the thing that hurt you at dinner. You made yourself smaller in conversations so the other person could feel larger, and you called it being low-maintenance. What you were actually doing was managing, managing their comfort, their ego, their need to feel unchallenged. When you stop doing that, the quiet that held everything together disappears. Suddenly there are silences where there used to be your accommodations. People notice. Some of them will name it: "You've changed." They mean it as a warning.
