When I was nineteen, a friend bought his first car. Fresh out of driving school. It was a Wednesday or Thursday, around three in the afternoon, and we had nothing to do. Him, me, and another friend. So we drove to the center of the city, had a few beers, and then it started raining.

On the way home, rush hour, wet streets, he started driving fast. Not drunk, but brave enough to be stupid. I told him to cool it off or I'm getting out. Next traffic light, he floored it again. Red light. I opened the door, got out, and took public transportation home. We're still best friends.

I tell this story because at nineteen, I didn't think twice. Something felt wrong, I said it, and when nothing changed, I left. No performance. No calculation about what they'd think of me.

What I didn't expect was how much harder that same instinct would become in rooms where the stakes felt more sophisticated.

Somewhere in my twenties, I started overriding it. Not because I lost it, but because I decided the cost of using it was too high. I'd adjust myself to fit the expectations of people I didn't particularly admire, simply because they had some leverage over how I was seen. A silence here, a compromise there, a decision justified as temporary.

It didn't feel like betrayal at the time. It felt like maturity. Like pragmatism. Like choosing battles carefully.

That's the trick. Self-betrayal doesn't announce itself. It wears the same clothes as good judgment. You learn what the room wants and you deliver it. People respond, doors open, conversations stay smooth. You're understood. At least on paper. And because it works, you keep doing it. Each time costs a little less to perform and a little more to carry.

The cost shows up later, and not as drama. More as distance. The version of yourself you once trusted starts to feel theoretical. You still recognize your name, your work, your habits, but the internal alignment that made them feel coherent weakens. You become someone who is easy to approve of and difficult to inhabit.

At nineteen, in a car in the rain, I could stand by what I felt without thinking. At thirty, in a meeting room or a relationship, I'd talk myself out of it for weeks. Same instinct. Same signal. The only thing that changed was how many reasons I'd learned to argue against it.

Here's the mechanism I didn't see until much later. Every time you override your own signal to keep things smooth, you're not just making a social compromise. You're training yourself. You're teaching your system that its signals are negotiable. And negotiable signals get quieter over time. Not because they disappear, but because you've proven repeatedly that you won't act on them. Eventually you stop hearing them clearly enough to know what you actually think. You're not confused. You're well-trained.

That's why the instinct I had at nineteen felt so far away at thirty. It wasn't gone. I'd just built years of evidence that I wouldn't use it.

When I started reversing this, life got less comfortable. I chose more slowly. I disappointed people more often. I stopped smoothing over misalignment for the sake of ease. Things became less elegant but more exact. There was no applause for it. Often there was friction instead.

The move that started it was small enough to feel stupid. Before agreeing to anything like a meeting, a favour, or a position I didn't hold, I started pausing long enough to ask: "Do I actually think this, or am I performing agreement?" Not out loud. Just internally. A half-second check.

Most of the time the answer was obvious. I'd been about to nod along with something I didn't believe because nodding was easier. Catching it didn't always change what I did. But it made the override visible. And an override you can see is one you can choose to stop making.