Post #2882794

2026-05-26 17:05 UTC

One of the hardest things for me to untangle as I’ve gotten older is the realization that understanding another human being is far more fragile than I once believed. When I was younger, I thought misunderstandings mostly came from bad intentions. Gossip. Cruelty. Dishonesty. And sometimes they do. But I think a lot of what happened in my life was much quieter and far more complicated than that. I think many people were genuinely trying to understand me while lacking enormous amounts of context, emotional framing, and lived experience necessary to interpret me accurately. And human beings do not tolerate missing information very well. We build narratives. We fill in gaps. We attempt to create coherence out of fragments. So one person knows you during a trauma period. Another knows you while you’re masking. Another only sees your writing online. Another encountered you during burnout. Another heard stories about you while somebody else was hurt or angry. Another knows your emotional reactions but not the events surrounding them. Another only knows the “aftermath” version of you after years of accumulated stress. And eventually all of these fragmented impressions begin hardening into something that starts to feel more real to people than your actual lived experience. (1/8)

Replies (1)

@Rosalyn@mindly.social 2026-05-26 17:05

I think this is part of why I struggled for so long to distinguish conflict from drama, constructive feedback from gossip, caution from discrediting. Because from inside the situation, all of it felt emotionally real. People would tell me they were “just communicating,” “just asking questions,” “just expressing concerns,” and on an individual level, many of them were telling the truth. But over time I started realizing that conversations which were supposedly about understanding often left me feeling less understood, not more. And I think a huge part of that was because many of these conversations were taking place while I was already in a hyper-verbal state. People often interpreted my hyper-verbalism as dominance or emotional aggression because externally I was talking a lot, explaining a lot, contextualizing everything. But internally, it usually came from panic, confusion, desperation, and the overwhelming feeling that I was failing to communicate something important about my reality. The harder I tried to clarify myself, the more tangled everything became. And looking back now, I can also understand why some people experienced me as overwhelming. (2/8)

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