For most of my life, I lived with a fear of not being understood.
When people misunderstood me in some way — my intentions, my ideas, my motivations — I rushed to explain myself. The more I grew and changed, the more my ideas and thinking diverged from that of the mainstream culture around me, so the more I felt alienated. The more I felt misunderstood. And the more I felt a slight panic that I would be “in trouble.”
This took me a long time to figure out.
When I was a child, I constantly had to explain myself. My father could launch into one of his verbal assaults any time the mood struck him. If I said the most casual of things which he misunderstood — as “disrespectful” or wrong in some way — I could be under assault without warning. And once he started, he never backed down.
I learned to go to insane lengths to be clear to him, but I still worried about the inevitable misunderstanding — and I grew up to take that same fear of being misunderstood into all of my life.
We’re neither friends nor enemies, just strangers who share the past
Society needs storytellers to help make sense of a changing world
My bad teen poetry suggests I’ve always hungered for missing love
‘This path leads to somewhere I think I can finally say, I’m home’
When love finally dies, it’s like a fever breaks and the pain is gone