On the size of a life
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.”
Nin is not talking about bravery in any dramatic sense. She is describing something slower — the way a life narrows one avoided conversation, one declined invitation at a time, until the smaller shape feels like circumstance rather than choice.
The proportion runs both ways, which is the part worth sitting with. Nothing has to be reclaimed all at once for the walls to move at all.