When I was younger, I used to be consumed by resentment over any perceived misunderstanding or false impression of me. Part of it was the very natural irritation that anyone might feel from being “misperceived,” as it were. Looking back, though, I think a lot of it was also about the obligations or expectations that people came to impose upon me based on those impressions, and the anger that came from feeling suffocated or hounded by those expectations, especially when it often felt like there was nothing I could do to dispel or escape them.
If only people understood me, I used to think, then they wouldn’t see me as just another object or cog in their plans or self-centered little illusions, and they wouldn’t make demands or requests of me that seem to fundamentally disregard / ignore / disrespect who I am as a person.
Or, as Gen Z / Gen Alpha might put it, If only people understood me, then they might stop treating me as an NPC in their little “main character” narratives and see me as a person in my own right.
It matters little to me now, being (or feeling) misunderstood. So much of what used to weigh on me, to an often debilitating degree, just doesn’t matter anymore. Mainly because I’m clearer about who I am and what I care about, and I have more agency to rebuff, avoid, or ignore anything that doesn’t square with that.
I think a lot of last year was about encountering that notion in various forms and trying to piece those encounters together into some kind of coherent lesson: asserting what kind of spaces (if any) I have the capacity and willingness to let others occupy in my life; accepting what kind of spaces others will allow me to have in theirs.
It’s been hard, and sometimes messy, but if nothing else, I ended last year feeling much lighter than how I started, and I’m grateful for that.