I Will Not Shrink Again

Letting go of family expectations and standing fully in who I have become

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On the first Saturday of 2026, my daughter and I had lunch with my brother and his wife. It’s the first time I’ve seen him since we reconnected in 2025, and it could easily have been the last time. Not because I don’t want to see him again, but because he’s not actively trying to keep in touch. I will not keep forcing contact that isn’t being reciprocated.

Even before lunch, irritation took hold of me. It’s been months since I last had a conversation with him in my head. On the brink of seeing him again, it was as if a penny had dropped.

When we saw each other in June 2025, he mentioned how he thought of me as two people, one before I was eight or nine, and one after. I understood what he meant. Yes, I changed at that age because of sexual abuse by a family friend.

In many chats after that, he had always made me feel… judged. Like it was wrong of me to have changed.

No, they were never direct words from his side. Never something I could lay my finger on. I never really thought about it until that morning before the lunch appointment, getting physically and mentally ready to see him. That was when I realized that I always adjusted myself, shrank myself, when I was in the same room as him.

I’d always done it with my parents, always been the one to keep the sweet peace, and when he is around, I still do it.

I don’t want to.

I want to be accepted and not apologize for who I am now. All the experiences in my life have formed me into who I am today, someone I am damn proud of. I am a friendly, loving, caring, creative, hard-working and occasionally funny person with some quirks. There are many people who accept me exactly as I am.

My brother still makes me feel like he wants to change me, like I am not good enough. He makes me feel like I continuously have to apologize for who I am; who I have become.

Apparently, when I contacted my father’s widow for my father’s birth and death certificates, and consequently asked her to get me in contact with my father’s half brother — all for the sake of researching our family tree — all hell broke loose behind the scenes. My father’s widow called my sister-in-law asking what nonsense I am up to now and what wounds I was going to open again.

My brother mentioned this during our lunch and made the remark that people still see me as the person I was back then. He didn’t define what ‘back then’ meant.

What the actual f?

I think my irritation comes from the fact that everyone may voice their pain, speak about their traumas, ask for understanding, but when I do so, it’s seen as insignificant.

That throws me right back to my childhood.

Back to where I wasn’t allowed to show my pain — don’t be such a drama queen.

Back to where I wasn’t allowed to have an opinion — don’t be so ridiculous.

Back to when I wasn’t allowed to speak up for myself — don’t make it all about yourself.

I became who I am now because of all the experiences in my life — the good, the bad and the ugly.

It was something my brother also voiced during our lunch: all our experiences, the emotional neglect of our parents, all our traumas… the sum of that is who we’ve become.

If that is true for him, why doesn’t it feel true for me?

No, wait… I know it’s true about myself, but why does it feel like they don’t see it as such? That they judge me for it?

Another thing he said to me is: “… when you take full responsibility.”

What does that mean? Responsibility for what? I take responsibility even for things I shouldn’t. Or does he want me to confess things to him? To tell him what I take responsibility for? Why should I? Who is he to expect that of me? What about him? Shouldn’t he then take responsibility too? Admit he had never been there for me in my hardest times?

He also said: “Don’t live in the past.”

Then why do they constantly bring up my past? Why do they measure the me of now against the me of my younger years? Can’t they see I have moved on? Why can’t they?

Maybe, just once, I want them to acknowledge my pain. Acknowledge that much of what went wrong in my life was a reaction to the wrongdoing of others. Not everything, of course. I’m not a saint. I had made many mistakes, and I take sole responsibility for those.

Believe me, and this is something I had said many times before and will probably repeat many times to come: I am my biggest critic. No one can be harsher than the voice in my head.

I want to be seen for the person I am today and not for who I was 5 or 10 or 30 years ago. I had never been a mean person, but through the years, I had twisted and turned myself in so many ways to fit the expectations of others that I had lost myself along the way.

I am not willing to do that anymore. I stand for who I am, with all my flaws, all my quirks, all my love. I will not shrink myself again to fit someone else’s mold of who they think I should be.

There is something deeply unsettling about being frozen in someone else’s memory.

It feels like they have labeled and archived who I was during my most wounded years and bring out that version when my name comes up. They ignore the growth and healing I have done. Time itself somehow doesn’t apply to me in the same way it does to others.

I am not who I was back then.

Neither are they.

Why then are they still measuring me against an old snapshot, taken in poor light at a time I was barely surviving? That snapshot doesn’t reflect everything that came after: the work I did, the choices I made, the ways I learned to live differently.

We all remember each other at our worst times. What hurts is their refusal to update their picture of me. They insist on holding on to a narrative that no longer fits, because letting it go would require them to get to know me, and perhaps admit their own role in my story.

I’m not asking anyone to rewrite the past. I’m asking them to stop using it as a verdict.

I refuse to be defined by reactions to pain that I didn’t cause. I refuse to be reduced to coping mechanisms that once kept me going, but no longer tell the full story. I won’t apologize for doing what I had to do to survive back then.

I am not trapped in the past. Yes, it shaped me, but the person I am today exists in the present tense. I have learned. I have softened where I once had to harden. I have taken responsibility where responsibility was mine to take. I have stopped carrying shame that never belonged to me.

I refuse to let anyone push me back to who I was. I am not that person anymore. If others choose to keep me frozen in an outdated version of themselves, that is their choice.

I will not live there with them.

I’m allowed to outgrow the roles that once kept the peace. I’m allowed to step out of narratives that no longer tell the truth. I am allowed to be seen as I am now.

I am allowed to unapologetically be me.

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Also read this wonderful, moving essay by May More

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