Recently I’ve been figuring out the degree to which I move through the world, instinctively calculating how much any given person can handle of me. I still show up as me—but often, I run the most vivid parts through a quiet internal public relations team, always and forever trying to optimize delivery. Growing up, I noticed that people who led with unmoored feelings were often dismissed. Their emotions overwhelmed them—and the people around them—and more often than not, anything true they said was swallowed in the tsunami of their delivery. So, forever ago, a tiny regimented part of me sprang to life, terrified of not being listened to, believed, or outright dismissed. She took the truth of my feelings and defanged them. Clipboard and PowerPoint in hand, this part of me used clarity like armor and reason like a shield—emotionally buffering and predigesting everything, not trusting anyone (and even more often, not trusting myself) with all of me. In an effort to engineer safety—to protect me—she shuttered and muzzled the parts of me that wanted to show up and communicate my feelings and needs—my desires—in a raw, visceral, and, if I’m being honest, far more compelling way. Because those parts—my unfurled desire, gritty disappointment, and uncurated fury—are just as valuable to me and the world around me as my thoughtful insight, gentle understanding, and quiet grace. And if I’m being really, really honest—being divided from those parts has cost me. To move through the world constantly and carefully measuring myself out is exhausting…even if I’m only just figuring out how exhausted I am. It takes a lot of bandwidth to calculate how much the world can handle of you. It costs energy to negotiate your feelings instead of feel them. There’s a price I pay every time I muffle my own experience, asking, “How do I make what I need more palatable?” “How do I make myself more palatable?” instead of simply asking, “What do I need?” Or—more frightening still—“What do I want?” So these days, I’m practicing letting the weight of what I feel land—instead of slipping under it to shoulder it for someone else, or softening it before it’s even fully formed. And so at 35, here’s to a year of giving back what was never ours to hold—and picking up what is ours to carry.