It lets your work speak and does not need to stand on the work to be seen over a crowd.

What I had been practicing was not that.

What I had been practicing was self-erasure dressed up as a virtue, a willingness to actively misrepresent who I was so that the men around me would not have to feel the discomfort of my competence.

And I had told myself it was graciousness, because that was the flattering name for it, when its true name was fear — the fear that if I stood at my full height, I would be punished for it with coldness, with sulking, with a marriage gone quietly frozen.

The tragedy, which I can see now, is that the shrinking bought me nothing.