The same person in a smaller chair

Dear You,

There’s a chair in my building’s lobby. Low, upholstered, the kind designers choose for how it looks, not how it holds. For years I didn’t sit in it. Not a decision, exactly. More a route my body took around the room without asking me.

A while into all this, I sat in it to tie my shoe and didn’t notice until I was already standing up again. That’s how I found out. Not from a scale or a photo. From a chair I’d been avoiding so long I’d forgotten it was avoidance.

I want to write about what it’s like to move through the world differently, and I want to do it without making it a transformation story, because it wasn’t one. I didn’t become someone. I stayed someone, and the room changed around me.

Being treated differently

People are nicer. There. I said the ugly thing. Strangers hold doors with more eye contact. Servers linger. A man at a conference who had looked past me for three years now remembers my name. None of these people are villains. They’re just people, responding to a body the way the culture trained them to, and I’d been on the other side of that training for a long time.

It would be easy to enjoy it. Some days I do. More often it makes me quietly furious on behalf of the person I was two years ago, who was exactly as funny, as competent and as worth a held door, and who got the shorter version of everyone’s attention.

I haven’t resolved that. I’m telling you because I don’t think it resolves. You carry both: the warmth that comes now, and the knowledge of what it says about the warmth that didn’t.

The discomfort of being seen

Before, I was good at being unseen. It was a skill. Choose the aisle seat, arrive early, stand at the edge of the photo. Invisible is a kind of safety, and I’d been building the walls for decades.

Now people look. Not with judgment, mostly. With noticing. And noticing turned out to be its own weight. The first time someone said “you walked in like you owned the room,” I went to the bathroom and stood there for a minute, because I’d walked in the same way I always had. The room had decided to see it.

Being visible when you’ve organized your life around not being is like having the lights come up during a play you were watching from the back. You’re still you. But now you’re in it.

What stayed

Here’s the continuity part, and it’s the part I hold onto.

I still read the invitation like a contract. I still prefer the booth. I still laugh at the same things, cry at the same scene in the same movie, text the same friend when the day goes sideways. My handwriting didn’t change. My opinions about cilantro didn’t change. The person who ordered the small bowl last Tuesday is the same one who ordered the large one years ago, with the same taste and the same jokes and a different appetite.

The prescription came with instructions. Life was apparently sold separately. And the thing about life sold separately is that it turned out to be mostly the same life, with new seating.

I don’t say any of this to minimize what changed. Health changed. Energy changed. The chair changed. But the story I was told about change, by every movie and every makeover show, was that I’d become a different person on the other side. That the old self was a cocoon and the new self was the point.

That’s not what happened to me, and I think it’s worth saying out loud for anyone bracing for a transformation. You don’t lose yourself. You lose a route around a chair. Everything you were is still in the room, sitting down now, tying a shoe, not even noticing until you stand up again.

Want to tell me something? Reply to any Low Volume email, or write to me here. I read everything.

Getting Quiet shares lived experience, general education, and practical tools. For medical decisions and individual treatment questions, talk with your qualified care team.