Shrinking is the chronic reduction of yourself — your opinions, your space, your voice, your needs — to accommodate others. It starts as accommodation and becomes identity. The version of yourself that speaks up, takes up space, has inconvenient needs, gets slowly managed into a smaller version that causes less friction.

Anonymous thoughts about shrinking posted here are from people who have become very small for someone else's benefit — the honest account of the version of yourself that got edited out.