More of Me, Not Less for Them

More of Me, Not Less for Them

There’s something I’ve been thinking about more lately: pay attention to who makes you feel more like yourself.

Not who likes the easiest version of you. Not who is comfortable with you as long as you stay exactly where they expect you to be. I mean the people you can be completely yourself around. The ones where you don’t have to second-guess what you’ve said, tone yourself down, make yourself smaller or wonder whether you’re being “too much”.

Because I don’t want to be less of myself just to make somebody else more comfortable.

I want to be around people who give me room to expand. People who can watch me get excited about something and get excited with me. People who don’t make me feel silly for changing, learning, trying something new or discovering another part of myself. People who don’t need me to stay the same version of myself just because that’s the version they’re familiar with.

And I think that’s something we don’t always notice straight away.

Sometimes familiar feels safe simply because it’s familiar. We can stay in friendships, relationships, situations and even environments where we’ve slowly learnt to edit ourselves. Maybe you don’t mention certain things anymore because you know they’ll roll their eyes. Maybe you don’t celebrate something too loudly because you know they’ll find a way to bring it down. Maybe you automatically make yourself quieter without even realising you’re doing it.

Then you spend time with somebody who genuinely makes space for you and suddenly you notice the difference.

You talk more freely. You laugh louder. You share the weird idea. You tell them what you’re excited about. You don’t rehearse the conversation in your head afterwards wondering whether you should have said less.

You just get to be.

That’s the difference I’m paying attention to now.

I’m changing. I’m exploring things I never would have explored before. I’m meeting new people, trying new experiences and finding parts of myself that I think were probably there all along, just waiting for enough room to come out.

And I don’t want to shrink any of that to fit somewhere I’ve outgrown.

That doesn’t mean everybody has to understand everything I do. They don’t. We can be completely different people and still make space for one another. But there’s a huge difference between someone not sharing your interests and someone making you feel like you need to apologise for having them.

So my affirmation today is:

I choose the people and places where I feel free to be fully myself.

More of me.

Not less for them.

Daily Affirmation

Nova x