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My niece Lerato is 9. On Sunday at my sister's house in Centurion she sat next to me on the couch and I watched her round her shoulders the exact way I do. Same angle. Same head slightly forward. Same chin tucked toward the chest. Same caved-in shape across the upper back. She's nine. I'm 33. I'm 1.82m. I have been making myself smaller since I was 11 years old and a teacher at Pretoria Girls' High said I needed to "stop standing like a giraffe at the back of the class." I have rounded my shoulders for school photos so I would line up with the other girls. I have stood on the bottom step in family photos. I have ducked at house parties so I wouldn't tower over the men. I have crossed my arms in public for so long it doesn't feel like crossing anymore, it just feels like standing. For 22 years I have folded myself into a smaller package because being tall, especially tall and visible, has felt like an apology I owe the room. My sister Bongi phoned me on the Tuesday after the Sunday lunch. "Refilwe, why is Lerato standing like you do now?" I sat in my office at work with the phone in my hand and didn't know what to say. Lerato is 1.62m at nine years old. She is going to be taller than me. My sister has been telling me this since the kid was four. We have laughed about it. We have measured her against the door frame and joked about basketball scholarships and how she'd get the family height crown. I have never once thought about what I was teaching her every time I came over for Sunday lunch and sat on that couch in my standard caved-in shape. I drove home that night and sat in the parking lot of my flat in Hatfield for thirty minutes. I have spent 22 years apologising for my body. I have spent the last four of those years apparently modelling that apology for a nine-year-old who is watching me carefully. I have tried not to be the way I am. A R4,200 set of personal training sessions with a woman called Boitumelo at Planet Fitness in Hatfield in 2022. Twelve sessions. She kept telling me to stand "proud." I stood proud. She watched me revert within ten seconds of stopping the exercise. A posture brace I ordered on Takealot for R1,650 in early 2023. It hurt my collarbones. I gave up after a week. Yoga at a studio in Lynnwood. Six months, R380 a class, twice a week. The breathing was beautiful. The teacher told me my chest was "blossoming open." My standing posture in the mirror at the back of the studio looked exactly the same as the day I started. A psychologist for ten sessions to talk about why I make myself small. R900 a session. We did good work. I understand the why now. I still do it. You can't think your way out of a shape your body has been holding for twenty years. I had coffee with my aunt Connie three weeks ago. She is 61. She is 1.79m. She lives in Mbombela and I see her twice a year, usually at Christmas, and we end up sitting on her stoep until very late at night talking about everything. I told her about Lerato on the couch. I told her about Bongi's phone call. I told her about sitting in the parking lot at my flat. Connie listened. She drank her tea. Then she said something I had never heard from anyone in my family. "Refilwe, I used to do that. I did it until I was 47. You are not going to be able to stop doing it by deciding to stop. Your shoulders have lived in that shape since you were 11. The muscles in the front of your chest have physically shortened over twenty years. The muscles between your shoulder blades have physically lengthened and gone weak. You don't have an upright posture to come back to anymore. Your body doesn't remember it. When you try to stand tall, you are using exhausted weak muscles to pull against tight short ones, and you lose every single time within thirty seconds." I sat with that for a long time. She was right. Every "fix" I had ever tried was telling me to decide differently. Stand proud. Open your chest. Pull your shoulders back. Be aware. None of them had ever addressed the fact that my body had been physically pulled into a smaller shape over 22 years and had no real memory of the bigger one. Connie told me what she'd done at 47. She said her physio at the clinic in Mbombela had told her about something she wore at her desk during the day. Rods along the spine that took the holding work off the muscles between her shoulder blades that had been overstretched for decades. Straps that drew her shoulders down and back into the position her body genuinely could not find on its own anymore. It physically prevented her from slouching while it was on. So while it was on, her body got to spend hours in a shape it hadn't been in since she was a teenager. Connie wore it for an hour a day at first. Building up over weeks. After about a month she started noticing she would catch herself standing tall without thinking about it. The shape was being rewritten by the time she spent in it. She did this through her fifties. She is 61 and she stands at 1.79m in the photograph I have on my fridge from last Christmas, taken outside her house in Mbombela. She is the tallest person in the frame and she looks like it. I was sceptical. The R1,650 brace from Takealot was still in the cupboard in my flat. The R4,200 with Boitumelo had taught me that "deciding to stand proud" was a fairy tale. But Connie was 61 and standing at her full height in a photo on my fridge. And she wasn't selling anything. She was my aunt. She just didn't want me sitting in any more parking lots in Hatfield wondering what I had passed to Lerato. I asked her what she wore. She got up, walked into her bedroom, came back with a printout. An article by a spinal specialist in Pretoria. The one she'd been sent two years ago by her physio. I read it on the drive home, parked outside a Sasol on the N4. I ordered it that night. Day one, I wore it for 20 minutes while I made a cup of tea on a Saturday morning. The feeling was hard to describe. I had not stood in that shape in twenty-two years. My chest opened. My breath went deeper without me trying. Day eleven I caught myself in the mirror at Edgars when I was looking at a coat. My shoulders were back. I was standing at my full height. I had not been thinking about it. Week four I went to Sunday lunch at Bongi's house. I sat on the couch next to Lerato. I did not consciously decide to sit upright. I just was. Lerato looked at me halfway through the meal and tilted her head slightly and said, "Aunty 'Filwe, you look different." I didn't say anything. I just smiled. By the end of the lunch she was sitting differently next to me. Not the same. But different. Less folded. I'm not going to fix what 22 years of folding has done to her in one Sunday. But she is nine. She has time. And the version of me she watches at the next family lunch, and the one after that, is going to be the version that doesn't apologise for taking up the space she is also going to need. If you have spent your life making yourself smaller. If you are tall, or you were the early developer in your class, or you learned that being visible was unsafe and you adapted your body to disappear into the room. If you have tried to "stand tall" by deciding to and your body has refused you within seconds, every time, for years. It might not be confidence. It might be that your body has been physically pulled into a smaller shape over twenty years and you cannot find the bigger one anymore because your muscles have forgotten where it is. This is what Connie sent me: https://archify.co.za/pages/new-breakthrough-in-posture-health Refilwe