You're getting ready for the evening. You look good. You know you look good.
And then the voice kicks in.
That dress is too much. You're going to make people uncomfortable. Dial it back. Be approachable, not intimidating.
You listen. You change. You swap the dress for something "safer." You walk in feeling half as alive as you did ten minutes ago.
Later, you wonder why you did that.
Here's a question worth sitting with: Whose voice was that?
Because it sounded like yours. It felt like instinct. But was it?
Or was it the kid in middle school who called you "full of yourself"? The ex who said you were "a lot"? A culture that's spent centuries teaching women that their presence should be palatable, not powerful?
We carry these voices like they're ours. We obey them like they're wisdom. But most of them are just old software — programming we downloaded before we were old enough to ask questions.
The voice that says "be less" didn't come from nowhere. It was installed. By people who meant well. By people who didn't. By a world that finds magnetic women inconvenient.
The next time you hear it — the whisper to shrink, to soften, to dim yourself before you've even arrived — pause.
Ask: Whose voice is that? Is it mine? Or is it someone else's opinion I've been carrying as fact?
You don't have to evict every voice that isn't yours. But you do get to stop obeying them on autopilot.
You get to choose which voices earn the microphone.
And maybe — just maybe — it's time to turn up the volume on your own.