Years of adapting — to danger, to expectation, to silence — can make a man forget the shape of his real self.

We built our masks long before we ever entered a prison.

Some of us built them in schools where we were the only one.

Some of us built them in homes where silence felt safer than truth.

Some of us built them in streets, in systems, in courts, in cells — adapting to whatever version of ourselves was most likely to survive the moment.

But survival has a cost:

every time a man is forced to perform, a piece of him disappears.

Inhibition makes room for that self to come back.

This isn’t a place for performances or polished stories.

It’s a table where a man can stop managing how he’s perceived and let the inside lead for once.

And once a man is seen, he cannot disappear again.