APX-IV-0074
“I stopped shrinking into the smaller person my family is used to.”
Families have a fixed picture of who you are, often years out of date, and visiting can shrink you back into it. You broke the gravity this time and stayed your current size. That is not disloyalty — it's honesty. Love them at full height. The old small version was never the real you.
Your Practice
- Name the outdated role your family casts you in.
- Show up as who you are now, not who you were at sixteen.
- Don't argue about the change — just embody it, calmly and consistently.
- Love them without disappearing into the old shape.
The Architects
“From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.”
— Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Chapter VI, 1845