I grew up around niceness.
Not warmth. Not emotional honesty. Not openness.
Niceness.
The kind where people said one thing to your face and another behind closed doors. The kind where discomfort was swallowed, truth softened, emotions edited to remain acceptable. Nobody called it pretending. It was simply how relationships functioned.
And because everyone around me did it, I learned to do it too.
I thought this was maturity.
I thought this was kindness.
I thought this was how people stayed loved.
But even as a child, something in me felt off.
Around elders, teachers, authority figures, bosses, I felt like an impersonator. I knew instinctively that parts of me had to shrink to fit into certain rooms. Certain truths had to stay hidden. Certain emotions had to be managed carefully.
And yet around friends and peers, another version of me appeared. More direct. More honest. More alive.
Not everyone liked her.
Some people loved my honesty. Some called me bold. Some felt inspired by my authenticity. Others felt uncomfortable, intimidated, exposed by it. I slowly realised that people often love honesty in theory, but not always when it disrupts the emotional performance everyone has silently agreed to maintain.
And so I learned what many of us learn:
truth has consequences.
Over time, I began noticing something deeper beneath all this niceness.
Resentment.
Bitterness.
Emotional exhaustion.
Not just in others, but in myself too.
I watched how years of suppressing desires, anger, disappointment, grief, truth, boundaries, and authenticity slowly drained life from people. Especially in family systems where nobody really knew how to receive honesty without defensiveness, guilt, withdrawal, or emotional discomfort.
So everyone adapted.
People smiled while quietly hurting.
Stayed polite while internally resentful.
Maintained harmony while losing themselves.
And eventually I realised something uncomfortable:
Suppression does not disappear. It enters the body.
The neck tightens.
The jaw hardens.
The lower back aches.
The sleep becomes restless.
The nervous system never fully relaxes.
The body carries the weight of everything the mouth never said.
And then we reach for relief.
Food. Alcohol. Gossip. Scrolling. Overworking. Validation. Religion, Spiritual healers, Therapy.
Constant stimulation. Anything to soften the pressure building quietly underneath the surface.
Because if truth cannot move outward, the energy circles internally.
I notice this most strongly when I return home.
I can feel how certain environments affect my body before my mind even catches up. The emotional heaviness. The unspoken resentment. The exhaustion of living disconnected from oneself for too long. Sometimes I look at people I love and feel the grief of watching someone slowly die while still alive — disconnected from joy, desire, aliveness, presence.
And in those spaces, I notice myself changing too.
I become quieter. More passive aggressive. More emotionally fatigued. My body becomes heavier. It reminds me of a dream I once had — driving forward while repeatedly colliding with animals crossing my path. I kept moving, kept pushing through, but every collision left a dent in the car.
That is what suppression has felt like for me sometimes.
Not destruction.
Accumulated impact.
I no longer believe authenticity means saying everything to everyone. I no longer romanticise “brutal honesty” either. Some truths require discernment. Some spaces cannot hold certain parts of us. Some people are not ready to receive what disrupts the identities they’ve built around survival.
But I am beginning to understand the cost of chronic self-suppression.
And I think that is the hidden violence in being nice.
Not what it does to others.
What it slowly does to us.
So lately, my healing has looked less like becoming louder and more like becoming honest about what drains my life force.
Leaving spaces that exhaust me.
Protecting my energy.
Allowing solitude without guilt.
Returning to my body through movement, breath, silence, and awareness.
Choosing where truth can breathe naturally instead of forcing it where it cannot survive.
Maybe authenticity is not about becoming fearless.
Maybe it is simply about becoming too tired to continue abandoning yourself.