Death on a slow drip
A postcard from 1996.
The easy thing would have been the Adidas track pants — the ones with snap buttons all the way down, so you could unbutton them halfway up your shin and feel like something. The Bulls jersey. Or a cropped tank to match. So bold of you, just like your 1,263 classmates.
I had the temptation. I even owned a pair.
But every time I put them on, I felt borrowed. Not me.
The opposite happened in my grandmother’s attic. My uncles’ suede jackets from the 70s. My grandfather’s shirts that I’d cut up to retrofit jeans. Leg warmers. Doc Martens in summer and winter. Hair untamed. A long gaze. A smile that was there, but never on autopilot.
If you dressed like that, you knew people would look. And you handled it your own way — or you didn’t. And when you didn’t, it showed.
I’ve always been open by nature. But somewhere around fourteen, I learned that knowing when to stop smiling is a more accurate signal than any word.
A smile that stays when it shouldn’t isn’t kindness. It’s delay. The body lagging behind a decision that has already been made. And when the lag stretches, the smile shifts — not into something fake, but into something uncertain. A signal that doesn’t know what it’s doing anymore.
People confuse things. They confuse complicity with compliance. They mistake honesty for rudeness. They take warmth as permission and patience as agreement. And every time you don’t correct it, you teach them to keep confusing.
So you set the record straight. Not loudly. Not with edge. Just clearly enough that the confusion ends in the room where it started.
In Spanish we say poner los puntos sobre las íes — putting the dots over the i's. It’s small work. Technical. Exact.
Adolescence is an accelerated master’s program for anyone who will later have to hold a position in public.
You learn what it costs to be yourself. You learn which costs you can’t afford. You learn that some rooms are worth leaving, and some are worth staying in even when staying is uncomfortable. You also learn to recognize the look on someone’s face when they thought you’d be easier than this.
And you learn — eventually — that pretending to know things you don’t is the slowest possible way of disappearing.
Living in ignorance, dressed up as confidence, is death on a slow drip. Quiet. Gradual. Almost imperceptible, until nothing you say comes from where you actually are.
The alternative isn’t certainty. It’s being able to say I don’t know without performance — without faking humility, without faking expertise. Without faking anything.
It's the same muscle the fourteen-year-old was building in that attic. Or in yours. Filtering what was yours from what belonged to the room. Keeping enough of yourself intact to not dissolve under pressure.
Choosing yourself is maintenance. Knowing when to stop smiling. Knowing when to raise your hand. Knowing when something has already shifted — and acting before it shows.
You choose yourself once. Then you keep choosing.
I’m still loyal to the Doc Martens. Summer and winter. The curls stayed, even if convenience won the length argument.
I can look at a photo of myself from thirty years ago and see the same conviction.
Conviction is the only architecture that doesn’t scale back. Business is just the adult version of not blinking.
Summer 1996. Less wrinkles. Same conviction.
Lines Aja
Brand Strategist & Verbal Identity Consultant — Las Musas®
cultooruido.com