You're easier to live with than you used to be.
That's a compliment, mostly. You got quieter. You stopped bringing up the thing. The loud laugh, the bad puns, the whole Saturday lost to something nobody else understood. Filed.
A man, thirty-six, wrote out what he'd done to keep the peace at home. He gave up a lot of his hobbies, he said. Fine, everyone does. Then the second half of his sentence. And personality traits. The ones she'd called childish or ridiculous. He put them in the same pile as the hobbies and carried the pile out.
From 2008 to 2024, he wrote, he didn't go to a single concert.
Sixteen years. Not because he stopped liking music. Because liking it that much had been ruled childish, and he'd agreed to the ruling to keep things quiet.
They separated anyway. That's not the point, and it's not a warning. The point is what he's doing now, which he called remembering who he was. Not building. Remembering. It was all still there, in the pile, marked childish, waiting.
You've got a pile. Everybody who's kept a peace has one. The traits went in with the hobbies because they were easier to lose than the argument.
The one thing for the weekend:
Name one thing about you that got called childish, or ridiculous, or too much.
Then notice whether it left, or whether you just stopped showing it.
Josh
P.S. I finished my 30-day Ash Journal run on July 30. In public, one page a day, no edits, all thirty.
Five minutes. One prompt. One line of ash. The first seven days are free: truevitalyou.com/journal