I'm 66 and I've stopped apologizing for taking up space - not because I've become rude, but because I finally learned that making myself smaller never made anyone else bigger - Silicon Canals

"I spent forty years making myself smaller so other people could feel bigger. Ducking my head in meetings when I knew the answer. Letting louder voices drown mine out. Starting every other sentence with "sorry" like it was punctuation. Last week, I sat in my regular booth at the diner, spread my newspaper across the whole table, and didn't fold it up when the place got busy. Small thing? Maybe. But for a guy who used to practically disappear into walls to avoid taking up too much room, it felt like a revolution."

"Growing up, I learned that good people don't take up too much space. Don't be too loud. Don't have too many opinions. Don't make waves. My old man never said those words exactly. But he lived them. Worked his whole life at jobs where they told him when to show up, when to leave, when he could eat his sandwich. Never complained. Never pushed back. Just made himself smaller and smaller until one day he had a heart attack at fifty-nine and that was that."

"You know what's crazy? I ran my own electrical business for thirty years. Had crews depending on me, customers trusting me with their homes. And I still apologized for taking up space in my own life. Making yourself small doesn't make anyone else bigger. Here's what I thought would happen when I made myself smaller: other people would appreciate it. They'd see how considerate I was. How humble. How easy to work with. You know what actually happened? Nothing."

A man reflects on forty years of making himself smaller through apologizing, avoiding speaking up, and minimizing his presence to avoid inconveniencing others. This pattern began in childhood, inherited from his father who worked submissively his entire life until dying of a heart attack at fifty-nine. Despite running his own electrical business for thirty years with employees and customers depending on him, he continued apologizing for existing and taking up space. He realized that shrinking himself produced no positive effect on others—they simply filled the void he created. A small act of not folding his newspaper in a busy diner became symbolic of rejecting this lifelong habit and recognizing that self-diminishment serves no one.

Read at Silicon Canals