Shiba Inu

You have plenty of energy and you spend none of it on other people's expectations. You notice everything — you are far more aware of the room than you let on — and then you decide, on your own timetable, whether any of it deserves a response. Affection from you is real and rationed, which is precisely why the people who have it value it. You do not perform, you do not explain, and you have never once done something because it would look good.

The problem is that self-possession this complete is indistinguishable from not caring, and people act on what they can see. You assume the people close to you know where they stand, but you have not told them, and the gap gets filled with the least generous available interpretation. Meanwhile your stubbornness runs on the fact that changing your mind in public feels like losing, so you defend positions long after you have privately abandoned them. Saying the plain sentence out loud costs you almost nothing and would fix most of it.