The Biggest Slice

Dear community,

First of all, I thoroughly enjoyed your responses to last week's newsletter. Thank you for reading, thank you for participating and thank you for allowing me a glimpse into your inner worlds. I love the invisible threads of connection and learning about new and different points of view.

Last night, I went to a Super Bowl party. A friend brought a genuinely excellent cake. The kind of cake that makes a room go quiet when the box opens.

She cut it into slices of wildly different sizes and asked me which one I wanted. I paused and asked, half-joking, half-not:“Do you want the polite answer, or the true answer?”

She said she wanted the true answer. So I told her the truth (knowing dang well that I was diving in very murky waters): “I want the biggest slice.” She handed it to me without hesitation.

No one said anything.No awkward comments.No jokes.No visible reaction at all.

And yet—when I left later that night—I somehow couldn't help myself but feel like I was punched in the gut. 

Before we move forward, let me explain how these things work in my Romanian culture (or maybe in my own personal understanding of the Romanian culture!). Maybe it's the same for your culture, but all I really know are the unwritten rules of interaction in the Romanian community.

#1: If you're a woman, don't even think about taking the biggest slice- EVER! What good girl would ever admit to wanting, and not just that, but actually TAKING the biggest slice!

#2: If there are children at the party, the big slices should definitely belong to them.

#3: If you're a man, you can do whatever you want, because the world is your oyster and you're the only one deciding on the size of your cake slice.

#4: If you are a woman, and you took the biggest slice, there is definitely something wrong with you. Either you are a glutton, you are unkind or totally blind to convention. Neither option is great.

The Trigger Wasn’t the Cake

Nothing happened: there was no confrontation, no correction, no explicit feedback. I felt triggered not because I was shamed publicly, but because something old and quiet got activated IN ME.

I had taken the biggest slice.

And in my culture, as a woman—that’s taboo.

Not because cake matters.But because wanting openly does.

The Unspoken Rules I Learned Early

I was raised with the following invisible instructions:

• Be honest, but not too honest

• Want things, but not more than others

• Take care, but don’t take up space

I can have needs—as long as they’re modest, symmetrical, and socially soothing.

The moment I stepped outside that choreography, my nervous system noticed immediately, and it did what it was trained to do: it turned inward.

I went in kind of knowing what I was getting myself into (the rules of the community are clear to me, and I still chose to break them- because I wanted to see precisely how much I'm still hanging on to the conditioning, the invisible, but hard-to-break chains of pretending).

And despite of all that, I found myself wondering: “Why did I do that?”.

When the real question I would like to answer is: why was it so uncomfortable for me to name what I truly wanted?

I was explicitly asked for the truth. I told it. And that small act surfaced an old conflict: Can I want fully and stay connected?

For me, the answer I learned early was no. I preemptively used to take the smaller slice. I used to soften my wants. I used to translate truth into politeness and I called that maturity.

What I’m Sitting With Now

I am proud of myself that I challenged just another deeply ingrained belief, in a very forgiving and safe setting. And I am curious about the part of me that felt it had to pay for it afterward.

So instead of rushing to resolve the discomfort, I’m staying with a few questions:

• Where else in my life do I choose the smaller slice to protect harmony?

• What part of me felt alive when I answered honestly?

• What part of me got scared that I might be exiled (again) from the community? (fortunately, my friends are very kind and compassionate people, who never make me feel judged for my actions, and I believe, by now, they are used to my slightly eccentric self, possibly?)

• And what would it mean to let that fear exist without immediately correcting myself?

I don’t have neat answers yet.

But I do know this:

It wasn’t about cake.

It was about what happens when I let myself want something out loud—and trust that my belonging doesn’t depend on staying small.

 With love, (a tiny sprinkle of) rage, and reverence,

Corina