I Never Felt Like Myself Around the People I Loved
With acquaintances, coworkers, people I didn't have much invested in, I was relaxed, opinionated, genuinely myself. With the people closest to me — the ones I loved most — I noticed I became careful, agreeable, quietly monitoring everything I said before I said it. It took me a long time to admit that backwards pattern out loud. Why I Didn't Notice It for Years It didn't feel like a pattern from the inside. It felt like just being considerate, being a good partner, being easy to be around — virtues, not symptoms, right up until I compared how effortless I was with people who mattered less to me. What the Comparison Actually Revealed The closer someone was to me, the more I edited myself around them, which is the exact opposite of what closeness is supposed to produce. The stakes explained it: with people who mattered less, there was less to lose by being fully myself. With the people I loved most, losing them felt unaffordable, so I quietly optimized for not risking it. What That Optimization Actually Cost Being agreeable and careful around the people closest to me meant they were, in a real sense, getting less of the actual me than people who barely knew me were. The closeness I wanted was being undermined by the exact strategy I was using to try to protect it. What Made This Visible Noticing one ordinary evening that I'd just voiced a genuinely unpopular opinion to a group of near-strangers without a second thought, and then caught myself softening a much smaller opinion an hour later with someone I loved, made the inversion impossible to keep explaining away as just being considerate.
Meet Ori — built to help you notice when closeness is triggering self-editing instead of openness.
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Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN") is the Founder & CEO of weyoga Inc., a Delaware company. — weyoga.ai · mln@weyoga.ai
This is an illustrative composite, not a real member account.