An essay on perception, pressure, and personality

 

Updated March 2026

 

“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

Anaïs Nin

 

Part I

 

‘It’s like I don’t even know you,’ someone said. ‘You’re behaving like someone else,’ said someone else. These are also things I’ve said. It’s odd how, over time, it seemed like something threatening to become a universal truth: that we should remain unchanged, and change poses trouble. It conflicted with my held beliefs. What I’ve found to be truer is that it’s only one small facet within a spectrum of lived experience. What I’ve found with less relief has been that those who resisted change in me were often those who sought to keep dynamics engineered in their favour.

Lately, as I challenged those dynamics, people began questioning my character. Some wrongly assumed that if they hadn’t yet been privy to an aspect of my personality, then it must not have ever existed, rather than accepting the boundary and the truth of the matter: they hadn’t taken the time or held enough space to fully know me. 

Some spoke as if I suffered from multiple personality disorder, believing (or claiming to) that there were different selves in charge, when what it came down to seemed to be outrage and disbelief that my personality had dimension. Fancy that, a person, a woman no less, of colour(!) and an immigrant (HER or someone like her, of all people!) with a complexity it could scarcely be understood. If women (or any of us) lived in a world where we weren’t ostracised, shamed, and challenged at every turn; demonised, belittled, or scared almost witless, maybe more of us would understand that it’s more normal than abnormal, more typical than atypical, to feel and think some of the things we do. Without the stigma and judgement, we would have space for understanding.

We don’t live in an ideal world though, do we? So, we learn how to hide the pieces of ourselves people deem unworthy or unacceptable. We sometimes become an actual projection of what another person wants. This is bad enough when the person we do this for is someone whose presence in our lives is consensual; when it’s done as a result of violating methods of intervention, it threatens safety and our nervous system goes into overdrive. When we do this for anyone at all, we risk locking away some of the deeper hurts right along with what could be the best pieces of ourselves.

We play roles for the people in our lives and we wake up one day realising that we can’t perform anymore. We feel blank and empty, yet full to bursting point all at the same time, full of everything we’ve locked away beneath all of the things others have used for a cage or locked within one. Our negative emotions, our stances, those ‘bits’ we borrowed, practised, and rehearsed are an outpouring of not just what filled the cage and buried our real selves, but the cage itself. What lay within, beneath—in a sad little heap of ashes—was everything we were never allowed to say or be. 

‘Be bubbly’, ‘be fun’, ‘don’t take yourself so seriously’, ‘shape up’, ‘get real’, ‘be sensible’—‘be yourself’: a contradiction. 

‘Don’t bring us down now’. ‘Have another drink’. ‘Tell us a joke’. 

Be a joke. It’s all the same to us, they may as well say. And some of them have.

Let it go. Don’t dwell. Don’t take it to heart —

Some of us don’t take it to heart. Some of us give it back. Some of us refuse to lock it away and some of us maintain that boundary all our lives.

Some of us can’t.

I tried.

I’m a woman who grew up surrounded by those who projected, sometimes also out of fear (socially if not domestic), a distorted ideal of what that meant. A woman, just half a rung up from a girl—a good girl, at that.

Be a good girl, say the village, then ‘be a good girl’ say the men, later, where good meant bad and dirty, submissive at the very least, keeping house, keeping quiet, keeping them entertained, keeping yourself one shelf down from ‘top priorities’. One more role to play: don’t say too much, act your part—here, put this in your mouth and shut up. And you do, smiling through red-painted lips and you think, you believe, that you like it because for a while, a long time ago, you were liked, and now, you’re accustomed to pleasing, hoping somewhere along the way, that someone might actually consider you. 

Let it go. Don’t dwell. Don’t take it to heart —

Some of us take it to our soul. I did. Locked in my partially self-made cage, weak as I was to the pursuit and pressure of those around me, who in turn were weaker still to face up to their issues, thus rendering us all victims; we, the smaller, the submissive, the fairer, the fragile, sit in our cages, seemingly complacent and outwardly content, coming to terms with in secrecy, our existence, our roles, our boundaries—the door of the cage prising open a little at a time, kept open at intervals with the things of innocence and authenticity: holding hands with a best friend, singing at the top of our voices, art, and writing, and love, and motherhood, nature, belly laughs, shared vulnerabilities, simple honesty—things that hold something together and simultaneously keep ourselves apart from that which tore through the innocence of youth and the perceived sanctity of spirit. 

Spirit is easily broken. People claim it isn’t, but it can be whittled down like wood if we have not yet begun to realise how to fill up who we are with WHO WE ARE more like a vessel filled with ethereal energy than a fixed state of self prone to erosion. For those of us (which at times seems to be most of us) who are still caught in trauma, we resonate more with the whittled wood. We change who we are externally to right what seems wrong, and inside, our spirit takes another notch. We begin to mirror what is projected, to then project what has been normalised, and if there are more than a few sets of normalised behaviour, too many broken boundaries, discrimination and stigma, pathological intent, and/or overzealous pressure and influence from communities, we begin to split, to divide, to fragment.

 

1 Fragmentation of the Self

 

These aspects of ourselves become fragmented more severely by trauma. With repeatedly traumatic or problematically dramatic responses within an environment that feels unsafe, the feedback can be increasingly damaging. This negative feedback loop reinforces our sense of self in an invalidating way. For me, it fed a belief that I was wrong for the way I existed even when, in context, logic should have provided enough of a counterbalance. It created more of a divide within myself and I increasingly masked to suit expectations. I was hiding more of myself; that much was obvious externally. Internally, I was compartmentalising, ruling parts of myself in or out based on what turned out to be whims and piss-takes, even as my psyche was reduced to remnants, and further regression became an inevitability.  

People have some knowledge of what is thought of as a split personality; those who know might actually understand it or they might mistake it for the abstract portrayals in media. I have not been diagnosed with this, but the fracturing I’ve experienced as a result of multiple traumas does bear resemblance to both the abstract portrayals and other available information. Along with the complication of distorted portrayals of conditions such as this, there is also the fairly commonly advised practice of relating only to ‘the dominant personality’; I’ve seen variations of this strewn across media, and maybe the related advice works for some people. What I’ve found is that it is problematic, in that it doesn’t appreciate the holistic experience of the person. Instead, it highlights or favours just one ‘aspect’ and fails to acknowledge what should be arguably obvious: wholeness.

People’s fear of what they can’t understand leads to damaging behaviour from them, exacerbating the situation for the person suffering with this or similar trauma-related difficulty, and it perpetuates and enables shitty behaviour from those who don’t understand. When relating only to one aspect of a person and dismissing the rest, it creates hangups which might not otherwise occur. It risks creating more of a division of personality because this can often be taken (as it was for me) as a rejection of other aspects of self, whether these were actual personality traits, memories, simple mannerisms (authentic or mimicked, or simply borrowed in the way a person might do an impression for fun or ease), or traumatic memories. These often surface as roleplay or flashbacks, which, through the displacement of time and space, has the unfortunate and inconvenient drawback of presenting as crazy.

Fear or lack of acknowledgement of these things—or worse: ridicule and mockery and an overbearing message of ‘snap out of it’ or a yell of ‘what’s fucking wrong with you’ can lead to withdrawal. In other words, suppression or repression (especially under oppression) of these aspects worsens when there is a lack of mental and external space to understand. When compartmentalising too much, in my experience, it took along chunks of associated memory and other aspects of the self, rendering executive functional skills partially and temporarily inaccessible. While tackling this, I endured new traumatic responses from others over a considerable length of time, and this influenced my perception while in an extremely vulnerable state to a severely limited view of what was acceptable and what was available to me in terms of acceptable presentation and expression of self. It led to a perpetuation of the false theory of others to believe that I was not really altogether ‘there’—when quite simply, I was not allowed to be. 

My experience is not unique. It’s clear that these are patterns, and repeated over time, these patterns send a message to ourselves: we’re not good enough. 

Variations, for me, include: I can’t be myself, I have to control myself more, I am not safe, and further along, it tells me when I’ve exhausted all possible options of figuring myself out and finding that actually I’ve been as nice and kind and decent and accommodating as I could have possibly been within the realm of what is reasonable. I then started to feel generally unsafe in the world, about the world—exposed and vulnerable to being hurt.

That feeling—of not being able to let out what is essentially a truer version of myself—becomes externalised, and for me, this manifested as being too afraid to step outside. I found myself unable to leave whatever small space I’d found to house me in some fragile semblance of safety while I trudged my way through states of regression and progression. 

These fragments and states still held me, however disjointed and convoluted they became under stress. Like a story that isn’t told in a linear fashion, like a series where the viewer has missed several episodes but the series goes on nonetheless—I’m still who I’ve been and who I could become. I’m still alive, and I have a right to be. Given the right to BE, any of us can begin to put ourselves back together. It’s a long process, it’s difficult, and who we are at the end of it or even midway through is going to prove challenging for us and for those who knew us before, especially those with whom we’ve had difficult relationships.

 

2 Perceptions and Protection

 

I’ve found there has been an unwillingness in others to let go of their perceptions, of what was, of who I was—or rather, what I was often reduced to in their eyes. I often felt belaboured with the roles we carried between us, unable to authentically be myself, even in passing. I catered to others more than I should have in two primary ways.

One was within the frame of societal expectation. 

An example within this frame is the loose stereotype of who ‘we’ are as islanders and conflict about conformity. Behaviour perceived as foreign or borrowed clashes with more prevalent social stances and behaviour. There is intense pressure to both conform and dissent, with social consequences in dissent, even when dissent is betterment, and personal consequences in conformity. More widely, outside of the racial group, this translates to something yet to be pinned down and sorted into a neat box, despite ‘diversity’ setting a trend. Fear and curiosity underpin external scrutiny. It pushes social boundaries, as if stereotyping a racial minority outweighs moral conduct. In turn, this external categorisation intensifies dynamics within the group, and as a member of that group, I can attest to that. 

I’m not naïve enough to think that this is exclusive to a single place or that it’s uncommon; it’s that the undercurrent carries generational self-sabotage, that the origin of this is murky at best, that it’s distinctly unsettling, and something I find difficult to place a finger on without detonating a clumsy infrastructure built on the divide between ‘settlers’ and ‘natives’ and all of the blurred bits between. 

It’s something that created a currency of racism that runs through each of us and has us turning on one another and ourselves. It’s a fear of being ‘too brown, too black, too other’ while moving towards integration. It’s a fear of losing ‘nativeness’, and of being too ‘white’, all while simultaneously and naturally desiring the privilege that comes with perceived ‘whiteness’ while carrying (either well or awkwardly) a mixed heritage, a natural (and sometimes disguised) dialect that can betray intellect, and an emotional load often wired on blending.

My place within this frame, within the hierarchy—in terms of language, manner, interests, lifestyle—let’s just say, I learned it. 

The echoes ring, even now: 

‘That’ll put you in your place.’

The boundary that should have protected me was eviscerated beneath community self-righteousness and an enmeshment of beliefs that support only selective dissent from tradition, not independence. 

I succumbed to my position in life, whatever that position needed to be at different moments. It kept me safe enough for long enough. While I tried, from a true place, to internally register who I am, expressing it was another matter. 

How much or how often I succumb to a preconceived position is tied to capacity. With language and dialect, especially speech and my wavering ability to override early speech patterns, my presentation seems dependent upon energy and attention. This is also true for manner, linked to personality traits that are not always fixed but fluctuating throughout life, especially true for those of us who mask. Capacity is the key to presenting as ‘on’ or ‘off’. 

‘Off’ mode (for me) is often equivalent to tired and burnt out. It’s not a naturally permanent state nor is it wired in an irreversible way. Being expected to perform ‘ON’ under extreme or intolerable conditions created overriding neural pathways and further trauma. Capacity affects whether I present as polite and upbeat or coarse and surly. Under normal circumstances, it takes a lot to shift the ‘on’ mask if the social scenario demands it. Privacy violations and other dynamics exaggerated this demand, so that when I should have been decompressing, I wasn’t, leading to depleted capacity and an ‘off’ mode that became more prolonged than it otherwise would have been. 

This is the extent of it, and yet it’s been one more thing about me called into question by the community as though in my recovery, I’m locked away, boiling baby heads in the holy grail, when in fact, I’m recovering from an externally forced attempt to ‘help’ me self-actualise.

The second branch of my experience with people-pleasing is yet more personal in nature, for having forged deeper connections. In short: I was a pushover, tolerating manipulation and often only challenging it when faced with a precipice bigger and scarier than the risk of rejection. Conflict and criticism shaped my responses. I grew accustomed to unhealthy dynamics because healthy responses were met with conflict — setting a boundary to avoid future disruption, stating a preference with more conviction than was appreciated, or any number of mostly benign actions that were treated as outlandish. Over time, this shaped my view of myself. 

I toggled back and forth between not being able to speak my mind out of fear and being pushed too far on something I didn’t want, speaking my mind all at once, destructively. With support from both family and friends, each convinced in their own way of what was best for me, I learned to assert myself sooner, but these lessons were fleeting—no match for the overwhelming sense of threat that came with standing my ground or choosing a third option—my own. Assertions left too late or undone, the ground often gave way beneath my feet. People have exploited this, repeatedly undermining me, so that the ground has kept shaking long after the trauma should have passed.

Sometimes, the way I expressed things earlier in life fell flat because I was too timid to say enough to be understood, and then by turns, going too fast and far for anyone to maintain interest. I became, almost by default, a soundboard, a spare part, a parrot, a third wheel, and—let’s not be shy about it—eventually, a ‘slut’. I was too aggressively pursued, then rejected by turns, at all too young an age. These were all roles people were happy enough for me to play, a sidekick to their main character. Only in later years did several people recognise the depth that had been there all along. Their discovery of it came with a level of surprise that often left me with a bitter taste in my mouth that I refused to swallow but was too polite to spit out. Foregone closure.

An early and enduring mistake of mine was accepting something even when it was wrong, even when a wrong was being committed against me. Not only would I accept it, but I often found myself changing myself to fit within it. I was being ‘flexible’.

When I say ‘wrong’, I’m not referring to a slight in a workplace, although these things shouldn’t be dismissed. To give a clearer understanding of the breadth of this, I’m referring to being repeatedly coerced and forced into sexual intercourse, and then receiving and harbouring shame about it. More recently, I’ve endured harassment and further abuse in retaliation for speaking up about it. 

Over time, these things altered my reality and my view of myself. Even so, there is a deep inner resilience: a resolute belief in who I am that keeps me from fully accepting the projections and perceptions of who I am in the eyes of others, even as I messily break down. 

My own stubbornness has often created inner conflict, the kind that kept me inwardly true, if not always externally. This was never more so than within the turmoil created by someone else’s actions, their justification of their behaviour, and their refusal to accept what is right and wrong. My role within this or any similar dynamic now is to keep speaking up when needed, to protect and advocate, and of course, to generally maintain my personal responsibility. For a while, my ‘stubbornness’ wavered, and for a while, beneath the haphazard judgement of the unknowing, I encountered more whittling, more blows against my spirit, and those who sought to override the truth of the matter and found yet another opening—and of course, they fucking took it.

Stepping into who I actually am gave rise to conflict. Although I am the same person I’ve fundamentally been throughout my life, very few people know all sides of me. This is surely not unique to me, yet many have questioned my character as if a private persona or any persona is something to fear and dissect. Some knew only the quiet, polite side of me. Some knew what alcohol did to bring forth my extroverted side. That’s surely true for most people who consume alcohol. It’s hardly remarkable or unusual. Both sides of myself are present and intact with or without alcohol or drugs, as long as I’m in a safe space or experiencing an otherwise naturally elevated mood. 

The facets in between these two so-called extremes were known only to a few. It is a mix of the two, shaped in part by interests I generally learned to hide from most people—benign ones such as reading, writing, psychology, and art. These interests just weren’t part of the lifestyle I’d grown inwardly-begrudgingly conditioned to. If I spoke about some of them, even abstractly, there were very few times by comparison in which I’d connect with that person. Earlier peer connections were severed in a relocation, and even these had begun being overshadowed by the pull of attachment-related dynamics elsewhere. My experience in later childhood and early adulthood more often taught me that initiating conversations I was interested in having would be met with disinterest or outright mockery. 

Disinterest I could handle, in part because the introverted nature of my interests made a certain amount of isolation preferable. Mockery or shunning was another matter. Often, what followed was my submission to a schedule within many later relationships that monopolised my time, often presented in a way that made refusal difficult. This cast aspects of myself further into the background. Leaning into other people’s interests became an easier form of acceptance. There was some overlap here in that their interest in sex coincided with my curiosity, but the interest came while I was far too young and this certainly impacted my development.

There was little relief from the feeling of entrapment. Exceptions to this were within the rare (but often challenged) safety of a grounding but premature relationship, friendships that withstood the tests of trauma and drama, and bonds with family that have far outweighed endured hardships.

It’s a little easier now to accept disdain or dislike. It’s easier to risk being unloved or disliked or even hated because I realised that I was liked primarily for my chameleon-like ability to enable or endorse, often scared witless if when randomly speaking my true mind was met with negativity. There came a point where I could only really stand to be around a select handful of people, and this was harder if it was all at once for too long. Essentially, everybody ‘showing up’ all at once to get to the root of the problem is what caused one of the first of several nervous breakdowns. Interventions are awful, but public roasts might be worse.

Despite the experience of distorting myself to be accepted, the few I’ve been close to since expressed a similar feeling, especially regarding my sensitivity. That sensitivity and the emotional weight I carried were something I couldn’t regulate as well as I might have without unrealistic expectations and blind spots. Even as I acknowledged this, I too readily examined myself, internalising others’ input without establishing a boundary that ensured personal responsibility all round.

The interventions muddled and distorted logic, delayed progress, and hijacked healthy measures and outlooks, reestablishing a once-discarded equation of accepting something like love and begrudging tolerance with genuine care and healthy distance. Then, while I began grey rocking, a legitimate protective measure (and a term I learned only after the fact), I was berated for being inconsiderate, for applying self-care in forms others were yet to comprehend (meditation, journalling, art) as anything other than self-indulgent and a waste of time.

The interventions turned me inside out to dissect who I was versus who I was claiming to be and I’m certain they’ve found that it’s one and the same person.

I don’t lean into expectations as often as I once might have, and I try not to allow anyone to dictate my behaviour with prompts or body language — at least not as often as I used to. But I’m only human, and during the worst stages of harassment and trauma-related stress, my body would often respond habitually. During regression especially, my social skills and energy were limited, emotion hijacking function to the degree that it placed extreme stress upon my mind to socially interact. It became an overloading experience to discern responses, curb behaviours, and swallow emotion, to ‘press pause’, playback the moment to catch up on missed conversation, stall if necessary, and hope that a) my face was making the right expression, and b) my partially rehearsed bit of small talk (which I loathe) was being used in the right context. 

Don’t get me wrong here: this is not to say that I don’t or can’t pay attention, or that I’m not emotionally attuned, or that I don’t care, or that I’m incapable… it’s more specific than that: if I’m at low capacity, if I’m over-stressed as I was during the onslaught that came as a result of speaking up about abuse, the expectation of full functionality and attention should be adjusted. 

That aside, speaking more generally: if I care about you, I really care about you—but if you’re banging on about the weather or a paper cut, then I’m probably thinking about something else despite my best efforts not to. And if you’re purposefully trying to set me on edge, then it’s going to set my body and the entire conversation from that point onward on fire, and it’s hard to be socially responsive in an appropriate way while on fire, even figuratively so. If you’re feigning a secure and healthy bond with me after abusing me only moments before, I’m okay with admitting to the whole world that my ‘grey rock’ stance is justified.

In speaking about these things with another person, and reflecting on them myself (through voice memos, journaling, and art), I’m tasked with considering how much of an effort I made in any relationship to prioritise myself in a way that matched what I gave to the other person. 

The truth is: after a few failed attempts to assert myself with some of my closest companions, I gave up, easily bowled over by the dynamics alone. 

Today, it’s triggering to even accept a suggestion from them. That’s the impact. And yet, it pales in comparison to the impact from their intervention in a bid to fix me, to ‘not give up on’ me while essentially rejecting the essence of me. It’s hard to feel grateful for that, but as the attempts to control me decrease, gratitude begins to fill the space, and maybe we’re all a little closer to mutual understanding and acceptance.

The proof of my progress is in the slow but steady changes I’ve made now that I’m less concerned with earning or maintaining anyone’s approval. Approval is so closely linked to what we believe about ourselves. For some of us, it might be easier to hold conviction in identity-forming beliefs that are authentic. For those of us who have sought or still seek approval to a self-harming degree, these beliefs are more susceptible to being shaken or swayed.

I’m moving away from this state into a less fragmented identity and life. I am not as tied to every emotion of those around me, I am not as affected by every nuance and change, and I swear, this time, it’s really NOT bravado. 

I am perhaps generally not as bothered as I once was (and some would argue ‘ought to be’), and people who once took advantage of me have since labelled me inconsiderate. Honestly, I’ve mostly made my peace with that.

I no longer hide the aspects of myself others claimed to be ‘uncomfortable’ with, when in fact, it was primarily about dominance and predictability. Those ‘uncomfortable’ feelings were often tied to conversations no one wanted to have, despite necessity or basic reciprocity. 

Prior to more recent abuse and being publicly shamed, only a handful of people understood me as closely as I understand myself. I wonder (even now) whether that has changed. My dependency on the approval of others is no longer at the centre of my behaviour, and it gives me room to breathe and simply be. Being understood is still important to me, but it’s less pressing, more realistic.

Reality stands. 

There are things I won’t accept and cannot accept. I cannot embrace their outlook. I cannot indulge their opinions. I am resolute (at last). Their projection is not authentic; it distorts what is true, and it’s not for me to change myself according to their desires nor is it my task to change their minds. 

I am who I am.

 

Part II

 

3 Autonomy and Expression

 

We, as people, find it hard to look at ourselves. I found it hardest when I took on false beliefs, when I took on the perception of others as my own and the opinions of others, dismissing my own, dismissing myself so completely that I couldn’t recognise myself because of it. I stared down demons, those within me and without, demons who belonged elsewhere, demons who came to play in my playground, gorging on my fears, haunting me and mine, never leaving much of a breadcrumb trail back to their quarters. It’s difficult to see the paths these demons leave behind, but the scars are something else. 

The scars begin to look like they were made with the claws within. It’s important not to feed any demons within the examination of these scars, as you discern whose claws are responsible, and you learn to forgive all over again, this time in a way that doesn’t dismiss the harm someone else inflicted upon you. Self-blame has its limits.

Acknowledge your pain.

Who decides how epically terrible something has to be to warrant the right kind of attention? At what point do we restart paying attention to the damage small things do? Are we so desensitised that we ridicule pain and continue finding entertainment in it? Are we so burnt out as a society that we can only spare sympathy for someone who is physically bleeding or broken? Are the empaths forever doomed to be lumped together with hippies and pansies as though neither had merit anyway? Are we destined to raise yet another generation of self-loathing or narcissistic humans, or are we allowed to find a way through the tide of voices that say ‘we ALL suffer, stop making a fuss’ to come to terms with our own pain long enough to heal?

Those who say things like: ‘You’re lucky to be in a position to rest and recover while some of us have to work full time’ or ‘I don’t have time to break down’ have genuinely not considered what this means: it means that they’re lucky enough to be in a position to have their life still intact, a job they still manage to go to, and to have never broken down so severely it derailed their existence; make no mistake, the breakdown doesn’t fucking care if you have time or not. And in a similar way, most people don’t truly care whether you are what and who you say you are; it’s often more about what aligns with their perception of you and their capacity to understand any of it.

When a person calls you weird, I suppose what they’re saying is ‘you’re different’. I’ve been called weird in a number of ways, never more so than during these retaliatory events. The word weirdo could always do with more definition; too many have misused the label in moments of deflection so that it muddies the water and covers the real perversions of society. It’s difficult to discern what someone is implying when they say something or someone is ‘weird’ because it’s subjective. Within context, it can be either a compliment or an insult; without, it’s ambiguous and most of us are not comfortable with ambiguity. 

I proclaim myself a weirdo; I wear my self-assigned label with as much pride as I can muster because I have spent most of my life feeling at odds with a lot of people, places, and things, and I reached a point where I wanted to encourage self-acceptance within myself. Having someone call me weird in an offhand comment, my ego (albeit fragile and often self-pitying) naturally shudders but can usually manage shaking off the remark in the process. 

So, I’m a weirdo. Yes, I suppose I am a bit weird. Am I very weird? Am I weirder than the average weirdo? Hey, everybody, let’s poll. Who’s weird? What’s weird? What do we want and when do we want it? And how?

I’m introverted, anxious, depressed (that’s trauma-related), I’m sometimes loud and talkative — fast-talking, rambling on topics, but sometimes, I’m quiet, even mute, slow to speak, and shy to speak, and caught up on a backlog of processes. Is this weird? Or is this simply an inevitable result of my life and a ‘typical if not acknowledged’ response to how I’ve been received? Am I those things all of the time? No. Will I always be? Who can say? I’m humorous and candid, but on most good days, I can read a room and read a person enough to withhold, often leading people to believe I have no sense of humour or am afraid to say what I think. Is that weird? Or is this simply applying empathy? Does this mean I can’t crack a joke, or I don’t understand sarcasm? No. But does it mean I get every joke and understand every bit of passive aggression? Also no. 

I’m mostly neutral, mostly natural, but I’m impassioned about the things that matter to me, and my intensity can be alarming if the subject matter is not a welcome topic. Is this weird? Or is this simply expression, difference in interests, and someone else’s fear of emotion or even perceived taboo? I understand these things as ‘normal’ because I ask these same questions about everyone I interact with. Why are these things weird for some and not for others? Does it simply come down to bias, dislike, and discrimination? 

I’ve made my peace with the hurt of being subjected to those things so intensely, but these are patterns repeated across multiple cultures affecting those of us in vulnerable positions. It’s one thing to make a mistake, to be socially clumsy and awkward, to be overridden by emotions of our own; these things are inherently human. 

However, I’ve been alarmed by how ill-intentioned some people are, how determinedly deceitful and malicious some people can be. I’ve been alarmed by my inner defences against that and also how those defences have also failed me. It’s a new experience to simply observe my own feelings without those feelings now holding me hostage. The thoughts are less fearful. The state of alarm is subsiding as the fear does. This has been my psyche slowly moving out of regressive ‘inner child responses’ as the impact of trauma reduced and present abuse lessened. 

This left room for more of my former and authentic selves to emerge regardless of their state of integration. My neurodivergence is not simple nor easy, but I can simplify and condense my understanding of it down to capacity. My reserves are no longer so spent on fear and there is more energy, as before, to spare for reasoning. With a less fragmented psyche, having had fear holding chunks of me and my experiences hostage, my pool of knowledge is no longer in a temporary shallow state, and memory slowly begins to filter and function the way it once did, and perhaps better (organic senility — thankfully, mild — aside).

I acknowledge the often hidden struggle—my own and of others. I acknowledge you if you’re still reading this. I see your struggle in a way it’s rarely been seen. I acknowledged it years ago when I found myself at the tip of the figurative brandished pitchfork, and still, I wouldn’t shut up. 

I’m not a cookie. Stop cutting me.

Let me be. Let me speak. 

I don’t have to fit the mould. 

(And certainly not yours.)

BUT… for the times I couldn’t see the struggle of someone else, or couldn’t acknowledge it or respond the way I wanted to or should have, I’m sorry.

Given how many of us are drawn to familiarity and similarity, we often pair with those who have experienced trauma. It becomes doubly difficult to navigate, and during the times I was unable to show compassion the way I usually would, it’s often been because I was caught up in my own trauma — often dismissed as drama, which isn’t a helpful term even though I’ve used it myself. 

I’m sorry, but I forgive myself for those times because I have forgiven others; the latter outweighs the first by far. I am trying to practice self-compassion. With this truth and practice, I am able to find peace, even if only two minutes of it.

Others’ lack of understanding that these things exist on a spectrum; their lack of understanding of how wide and varied those spectrums are gave way to the level of misunderstanding that followed. People have taken most things I’ve ever said out of context, personally, the absolute wrong way, to extremes, to bed… 

Ironically, things I’ve said have often been taken in every way but inward for reflection by many of the people who persist with the witch hunt. 

Understand this: 

I persist, too.

 

4 The Cost of Expression

 

In other words, while people treated me like crap, I was overwhelmed by that crap, my body and mind functioned crappily, and when I couldn’t endure anymore, I threw the crap back at those people who had flung theirs first. I suppose we all go back and forth like this, tolerating other people’s shit. 

I’d had enough.

Then people had enough of me. 

And now, I’ve had enough of everyone milking that. I’ve endured their ridicule and abuse. It came in waves, en masse, and my cries fell upon the ears of those who monopolised suffering, had apparently formed an elite club to which I was too supported, too nice, too perceived to have been fed with a silver spoon to belong to. I was too ‘high-functioning’ but simultaneously perceived to be stupid and weird, and still, those people seemed to hang on to the things I said because it made sense. Until I said things that were too difficult for them to stomach. Their hurtful response to truth far outweighed my own. 

I’ve broken down in my truth. They broke me in being faced with their own. 

It seems they find themselves in a tight spot for having diminished certain things about me while begrudging me for owning them anyway. In doing so, they leave themselves voluntarily alone in their partially secret hardship, likely feeling unheard and unseen, resenting me for having the kind of stupid strength it takes to admit a truth. In that resentment, some have justified more harmful deviance rather than allowing themselves to be understood.

I empathise with that stance because I have lived it. My own little superpower has been being brave enough to care-bear my way through most of life anyway. My compassion was shoved back in my face and when it mattered most of all for me to be present and kind, I’d been conditioned (easily done in the vulnerable state I became stuck in) to turn the other cheek. Invalidation of my experience rendered in me the kind of callousness I was shown, something I’ve been punished for twice over as I failed to meet my own standards, an especially cruel punishment.

Things really have come full circle, with me surpassing the point of reward for opportunists. It’s not the first round. Each time, it’s more recognisable. My resistance creates conflict. My pattern was to stand down, internalise, self-blame, change course, change my mind. In doing this, my mind became foreign to me.

Breaking through took defiance first of all. Rebellion doesn’t look pretty on a forty-year-old, but I wore it like armour. 

Despite coming through this, time and time again, I kept finding myself back there because I was not able to find the time and space to express myself well enough, clearly enough, without interruption, without more traumatic pile-on. Even hesitation became punishable. So few understood that I required space to process, not more input. My slow response was treated as resistance or manipulation. 

I was unable to express myself in a way that felt comfortable to me but accessible and articulate to others. This was true within my relationship, the communities (former and present), and even among some family and friends. The distress became so acute that for a time I lost the ability to speak. Speech was slow when it came as I tried to find exactly the right words for the right audience. It was people-pleasing fallout at an observable level, and it wasn’t an entirely neurotic avenue and certainly not a manipulative tactic.

Can you imagine how overwhelmed a person might become, how overwhelmed I became, as people nitpicked every move I made and every thing I said because for the first time they were witnessing me at my absolute lowest capacity? They believed that who I was or who I was pretending to be was a lie and when I began using words like ‘masking’, this corroborated their theory, and they redoubled efforts to undo me—to get to the bottom of me. 

I was claiming to be honest because I simply am. I was at my most honest, most vulnerable state, in a way in which it is impossible to lie, to maintain the masking, to keep up any kind of appearance other than what is truly there in that moment—and still, people insist that was a lie, or that anything outside of that moment was one, too. Despite the absurdity of it, my despair increased. My despair swallowed me and my understanding of the world. It made no sense to me anymore because these people gaslighted my very existence at its rawest form and in the flames of their denial, I was left to burn. 

The level of disagreeability I’d been met with—the sheer scale of mockery and feigned confusion, and beneath that, inversely (for the times my confidence shone through) insecurity from others—all conditioned my response or in this case, lack of one. 

That lack of response was then weaponised by others. It added heavy layers to the circulating doubt both within me and among others. It resulted in a loss of credibility and capability at a time when those things were needed more than ever. 

In what I’m certain was an effort to keep me censored, the circle of harassers had widened. It increased impact and diluted culpability. I hadn’t been able to live, much less write, without harassment. It became nearly impossible to express, even in written words, without disdain or disagreeability or simple distraction—things that could easily replicate, for instance, a well-known disorder such as schizophrenia, something I was not stupid enough to rule out entirely, not without professional input. 

Eventually, it was ruled out — by professionals. More than one of them. But not before speculation had seeped into every corner of my life. Not before distraction had derailed my psyche. And not before the few relationships I had grown reliant on for their steadfast presence had disintegrated.

I think these disintegrations came as a result of polarising pressure from those who targeted me and those who wanted to help, but even those who wanted to help were susceptible to those same patterns that sought a certain amount of control over me. 

Speculation was clearly a contagion at this point, and I am as humanly vulnerable to it as any other. Even so, it was clear enough to draw clear-enough conclusions. Over time, I grew better at hesitation without crippling anxiety. I better tolerated criticism, even the unhealthy kind that bordered on abuse and mutated my default responses into more of the same.

That is how I came to be a ‘cardboard cutout’. 

I practised stoicism. I learned more about meditation. I read a book about letting go of other people’s tasks. I processed old trauma. I pieced myself back together. I cried. A lot. I talked myself through the worst parts. Sometimes, allies showed up and talked with me. Sometimes, they left clues in ordinary places to let me know I wasn’t doolally. Sometimes they left clues to steer me away from the harmful gaslighting of others because despite all of the hidden progress, there were still people who wanted darker results than I was giving them. The darker I or the situation became, the easier it would have been to cover up their lot. 

Those who denied the truth now have less intimidating stances. Fear and intimidation were an easy route for them, a difficult one for me, forced to relive my trauma under interrogation while at my most vulnerable points. Coercion was, I suppose, a little more effortful for them; maybe that’s me finally acknowledging my intelligence. What proved most difficult to navigate (and likely most rewarding for them) was the bluff. Duplicity is something I grew up knowing how to detect. I was raised to look for it. I can see it coming a mile off and I can even see the double bluff, but while in regression, I was reacting to the bluff, a slave to my emotions, and this is where their cruelty hit hardest: they began triggering with intent to keep me in that state of their preference to unravel, undo, unlearn—to protect their lie; while vulnerable, I was reacting to two-faced kindness, while open and honest, people were stomping around in wounds they insisted were not real, and their duplicity was only evident to me as I lay (figuratively, emotionally) bleeding. This gave way to mockery of me, belittling of my character, a complete discrediting of my person and my experience, and with that, I began to lose functionality for longer periods of time—one more thing they insisted was being faked.

People denied my experience, and in essence, my existence. It forced change that was inauthentic, erasing pieces of me I’d worked hard to build. Figuratively, I was being shoved back into a cage, this time a cage that refilled daily with lies, abuse, and the turmoil of my struggle to overcome it. 

I changed again despite the odds, against the odds, shrinking to fit someone else’s shattered illusion. Imagine feeling swallowed by yourself from the inside… eventually, that space fills with so much of you and inevitably, you break. 

Anger is usually the first emotion to break free as you do—it was for me, but I suppressed it, as I was taught. Conditioning I thought I’d long outgrown returned, aided by those who thought they knew ‘best’. The process was repeated until eventually, anger got the ‘best’ of me.

 

5 Positioning

 

Anger shows up when there’s been an injustice. Sometimes, the injustice is distorted. Sometimes… not. 

When a situation is unclear, the people around us draw conclusions. It was a long time between injustice and my speaking up about it. Even now, it’s called into question, with some people preferring an easier version of events than reality itself. 

Taken in context, it’s clear and fairly straightforward in theory: repeated trauma led to worsening symptoms. 

Repeated attempts by others to dissect the symptoms and disprove the traumas traumatised me further. The added complexity of knowing everyone in a small community makes the truth harder to accept. It was obviously easier for many people to demonise me as a liar and a fraud, even as the patterns of abuse against me kept showing up, even within their conduct. 

The dynamics I encountered were not random. They followed a pattern that has since been recognised within psychological literature. DARVO (Freyd, 1999) is a term I’ve come across as recently as December 2025. The acronym stands for Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. This tactic is woven throughout what happened to me over the course of events between 2019–present date relating to: a) those who sexually abused me, b) those who violated their position and invaded my privacy, publicising my life, c) those who targeted me because of upsetting but true comments I made about island dynamics in what would previously have been a private space, d) harassment of me by those who failed to see how their violation creates a cycle of behaviour, and e) the complex abusive behaviour between my partner and me as both partial cause and effect.

As things grew crueler and harder, so did I. I hardened. I grew brittle, unable to give in in many senses of the word. So much of it came down to power, but while I was struggling to retain mine, others were exploiting their power and trying to relieve me of mine against my will.

It showed up in many of my relationships, and my relationship with my partner saw the worst of it. We were mid-pandemic, mid-relationship, and mid-life.

As interactions between myself and others became detached and more hateful on both sides, I gained insight even in the throes of bullying betrayal. The insight showed two sides, revealing truths about myself and about those who continued to cross my boundaries; I began to think of it as being the subject of a director’s spotlight. What I found was that the chosen position of the spotlight is often demonstrative of the director’s inner psyche. While I, the subject, reacted, the reaction of the director—the would-be scientist—also revealed hidden truths.

In cherry-picking ‘preferences’ others believed would benefit my partner as they ‘re-built’ who I was through coercion and intimidation, biases became obvious. Cultural ‘norms’ became clear, some in stark contrast with those of my mixed-origin childhood community or which share an overlap. Distortions and unhealthy dynamics reared their heads throughout, and on highlighting these, on drawing attention to the issues, I indirectly invited yet more abuse and retaliation from many who were involved.

I was at this point, operating from within an internalised rhetoric of ‘what’s wrong with you?’ Retaliation was met with some initial rejection on my part, but defiance, when it showed up, was but a flimsy surface reaction to a deep and multi-layered sense of injustice. I internalised the retaliation of others as a personal flaw. While I recognised early that their reaction was coupled with a refusal to believe that I had an understanding of myself or others on a level outside of their projection, it took months that lapsed into years to correct the damage they caused. 

That damage rendered me emotionally overwhelmed and eventually, emotionally removed and temporarily retarded, if you’re not too sensitive to the latter word. Coupled with sensory overload and selective mutism (involuntary, despite the term), I was more vulnerable than I’ve been since I was an actual child.

Within the dynamic of being submissive to the male counterpart, it bred more sociopathy between us, rendered nuance and safe space more limited. Within the situation of having my life exposed to harmful deviants, it became their playground, and I was the new broken toy.

In short, other people’s efforts to control my behaviour according to a specific cultural and personal preference was a form of tolerated abuse and conditioning that paved the way for less understanding among all of us.

While I was the first to bodily lash out, the escalation into physical violence did not begin with that. Everything that built towards that point is dismissed once the body reaches its limit and the mind loses control. 

I’m not violent in temperament, but my mind acknowledges its shadow. I had endured enough mistreatment — enough covertly normalised violence, mislabelled, and diminished. I had used every other means to communicate, to reason, to stay patient and calm, and failing that, compassionate and sane. My womanly vulnerability was punished, and I grew exhausted with submission. When all was said and done, I behaved ‘like a man’, but was subsequently punished ‘like a woman’.

The escalation didn’t end when I was struck back. Our dynamic didn’t equalise when I was struck unprovoked. And it didn’t resolve the issue to brawl through our emotions instead of containing them. 

The struggle lay within our prior inability to contain them.

As a woman, I’m expected to do that more consistently than a man might. Am I less of a woman for not being able to? Or am I more admittedly human for failing to maintain an impossible double standard?

‘Like a man’ conjures a different image when faced with the reality of allowance. Yes — not all men are ruled by emotion. Not all men turn to violence to settle their differences. The difference between genders is that they are allowed to within some contexts. Women, on the other hand, are shamed into erasure for behaving in a way that relinquishes control to a feeling. Finally, I was ‘overemotional’. Everything up until that particular point has been a mostly reasonable response, even if it wasn’t understood at the time.

Over the course of my life, it’s difficult to know how I’ve been received outside of my own experience. I’m not unaware of the tricks a mind can play, how these things feed our insecurities. And yet, patterns become observable among the crowd, and to maintain my interpretation of it is distorted is to falsify reality.

The incidents during and following the pandemic made interpretation of how I was being perceived by others clearer than ever. Ironically, the clarity of perception was directly contrasted with the absurd falsity derived from their tunnel vision. Some interpreted my defiance under oppression as narcissistic pathology. Attempts were made to correct my behaviour based on that assumption. Because the assumption was wrong, the intervention did not correct anything. It destabilised everything.

My deviation occurred because of peer pressure, pressure to strengthen in ways which felt like they belonged to outgrown versions of myself because I was presenting as ‘too weak’, as ‘giving in’ and ‘giving up’, but regressing to old behaviours and borrowed behaviours caused more pain, my own and for others, and it didn’t align with who I had been becoming and who I wanted to become, and primarily, because others dictated their version of ‘ideal’ and laughed as I failed to meet their projected standard as though their 

What occurred in the aftermath—tests of my sanity and my competency—has been as traumatic as the events that led to them, in part because there is little justification. The sequence is clear: repeated trauma led to worsening symptoms. The remedy is also clear: reduce the ongoing trauma to relieve symptoms. 

It seems most difficult for those who misinterpret their input as beneficial instead of imposing or invasive or simply inaccurate to comprehend that the method and manner in which they intervened is as traumatising as those who did so playfully, harmfully, abusively… sometimes, all at once. 

So, the trauma persists. 

The worst part in all of this besides nearly losing my mind? 

How little my boundaries matter.

Thankfully, now, this false belief is one held only by others. My boundaries matter. My beliefs matter. I matter. 

We all matter, and so many of us are too keen to prove that we do. 

There are those who believe some of us will always be affected by them and manipulated by them. In some cultures, we’re obligated to hide much of ourselves away. In some, cutting long hair becomes a marker of transition. In different times, submission is equated with survival. 

If we learn these things in vulnerable states, it becomes a lifetime’s worth of work to rewire this belief. There are evidently more people willing to reinforce beliefs like these to keep their perceived power within reach than there are those who will fight against them. The reason? Fighting against them costs too much. 

Fight anyway.

There are those who insist we have to ‘wear our pants’ secretly because blatant ‘wearing of the pants’ results in a shift in respect. I’ve found, on ‘wearing’ whatever the hell I choose, that untethered folk offer more respect, while the tethered withdraw.

This should mark a shift in control: agency, autonomy, purpose, and fulfilment. I’ve found that it leaves an opening which, if preoccupied with mental recovery and if too trusting, too many people will try to fill the space. Those with historical ties will try to maintain those early tethers, sometimes out of fear and sometimes out of egotistical purpose. Others, out of sociopathic need that shouldn’t be enabled. Sometimes, it’s both.

I did not respond well to having my self-control hijacked. I think I’m more human for my fight. To give up that fight, to let myself be controlled any longer than I was, would have been a half-life, a less human experience. That would have been ‘giving in’ and ‘giving up’.

I no longer carry shame for fighting for my right to exist, for having the audacity to exist even against allies. I can’t be everything everyone needs me to be all of the time and I cannot fulfil everyone’s desire at a whim. 

That’s the reality. I accept it. 

Others refuse this fact, even for themselves. Even when care and consideration are present in the roles we have committed to, it seems difficult for some of us to understand and accept that we can now be equally committed to ourselves.

It feels uneasy, yet right. 

The part that feels uneasy: that’s the part that has a built-in echo of things past generations hold, the part that required rewiring, the part that says ‘I should put myself last because everyone matters more’, the part that says ‘I’m okay’ when we’re not, the part that keeps us feeling small by comparison, the part so many of us are trying to make peace with or let go, a part that refuses to be let go of, a part that cannot be let go of completely without losing a significant foundation block, a defiant strength. 

And yet to keep building upon it without painfully acknowledging what’s wrong within this kind of strength is to be at odds with ourselves for more years to come. This strength was borne out of necessity, out of survival, passed along the generations, thriving through hardships while creating more of the same. I want to do more than simply survive, and I want to live in a way I can be at peace with, even if doing so continues to create animosity among the women and men I once respected.

I have to endure; I have to keep choosing my own path, so I am no longer becoming more like them but becoming more like myself. 

As for those who intentionally harm, there is far more power to be found in self-examination than the perceived power stolen from those in vulnerable positions. Maybe if that knowledge was more widely shared, people would be more inclined to go perceive themselves than fuck themselves. 

I can no longer allow myself to morph into anything other than myself. Projected realities and ideals tested that for too long. People I once trusted have rendered the whole world untrustworthy, and I still can barely step outside my door without leashing the misplaced anxiety that I am too much for the world, when in fact, the world has been too much for me. I leash my anxiety now with a quietly fierce knowledge that being forced to swallow my light invited more shadows.

It is unmasking. It is daring to shine. It is, in the face of the world telling us who to be and how to be, taking off the persona we’ve donned to fit in, and daring to stand out, changing ourselves by choice as we move through the world, through our pain, through any adversity. When in doubt, when confused about who we are and who we’re told to be, what determines the lesser of what might seem like two evils in the thick of things, is whether or not something feels authentically right. 

Masking—overdone politeness, cover-ups and withholding of opinions, agreeability to the extent of yes-manning (or yes-womaning) our way through life to keep the peace, over-consideration of everyone else and dismissal of the self, adopting roles and accepting dynamics at the say-so of the dominant figures within a social group when it goes against our principles and morals—it’s all another spadeful of dirt on an early grave of who we are at our core. 

It goes beyond situational personas; it is an imposed illusion that I chose to shake. The foundations it was built upon shook because of someone else’s protests. I’m more myself without the weight and control of others’ unhealthy expectations.

Breaking that illusion was interpreted by others as a loss—of me, or of what was. Sometimes, both. 

The irony is: I’m still here.

 

Unlike

From Differences to Victimisation

 

We are all so very alike, or at least, we have the potential to be. We, of course, have different interests, and these vary based on more fundamental aspects. Motives, values, cultural habits, circumstances, and environment can vary drastically. These differences shape us as much as our outlook, and these differences often overshadow our similarities to the extent of feeling ‘other’, ‘foreign’, ‘alien’. 

Humans look for familiarity. We find comfort and safety in this. For those of us who find so little comfort and safety, so little likeness with those around us, or with who we are deep inside, we form an enduring false belief about ourselves: our differences are bad.

There is a sense of wrongness twisting through that false belief. It lends itself to harmful behaviour, whether in us or against us. It stems as far back as a child who had to accept something that didn’t make sense, something that hurt them, something that conflicted with what their body told them was safe and kind. It set up a lifetime of crossed wires that are reinforced by those who continue to exploit and ridicule. It goes on to create a vibe of ‘fuck off and leave me alone’ so vast that life is lonely even in a crowd, and help seems to be just another way for someone to fuck you over. Whether we project the vibe externally can determine what kind of life we live. For me, it seemed one of the few choices I still had. Eventually, that was taken from me, too. #metoo

When difference is misread as defect, victimisation becomes easier to justify.

What about when choice is taken from us? When there is nothing left except survival? What we do or fail to do in that phase can cause impact so severe that any expression of empathy can threaten survival resources shifting us to a regressive phase. 

On top of that, it’s an amplified difficulty to overcome the issues of trust: whether we can even afford vulnerability.

Some of us can’t be as vulnerable as we’d like to be because of fear.

Part III

 

6 Deviance from Self

 

“For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” (Newton’s Third Law of Motion)

I stopped imploding. 

Trauma recovery forced me to deviate first from the person I had been. Afterwards, what I discovered was this: the will to be a decent human could only be reclaimed when allowed choice, rest, recovery, and resilience. I can now say I’ve not been kind, I’ve not been forgiving, I’ve not been friendly, I’ve not smiled when I wanted to cry without debilitating and misplaced guilt. It was harder to say these things before this point because it was harder to do (unless alcohol was involved), and odd as it might seem, I’m a better person for these undesirable things because it’s meant that I’ve stood my ground against those who didn’t only wish harm but inflicted it. 

This might sound contrary. This might alarm some people. Those who have been on the receiving end of coercion will understand. Those who have been abused will know how thin the line actually is between ‘okay’ and ‘now, you’re in trouble’. It’s harder to simply react or respond as ‘you’ might if you don’t know who ‘you’ are outside of fear.

Maybe that fear is about that very moment, or maybe it’s in knowing the cumulative effect of what happens both inside and outside of a well-conditioned script. It’s about learning how to change that with minimal damage and often failing. 

It’s about being groomed. It’s about people learning tells, and weaknesses, and noticing how a young girl might respond to a certain come on. It’s about knowing now how these things follow us from childhood into adult life and how, in moments of comfort and familiarity, they can undo the fabric of ourselves, poking holes in boundaries we never knew we ought to have had or were allowed to keep without question or consequence. 

Too often we’re shunned for these behaviours, reprimanded for defending ourselves, and we learn too early that we don’t matter enough to stand up for ourselves. When we finally do, if we do, it potentially unleashes years’ worth of buried torment and pent-up emotion. 

For me, it was a frenzied flurry of defiance in which my boundaries went up with shattering clarity. 

When people tested those boundaries, I still smiled even while panicking and giving a warning, but the smile was too encouraging for some and when those boundaries were repeatedly crossed, I lashed out. People have mistakenly assumed that these lashes came about with little justification, when in fact, attempts to tear down my boundaries time and time again justified my maintenance, if not the physical defence. 

Too often, our behaviour is driven by circumstances. Organic movement or stalling in our development is impacted by exposure to behaviour of others and the things we consume, adopt, or mirror, whether it’s a display of something unacceptable or an expectation or projection. This is further impacted if our position is particularly vulnerable by comparison, and if we are exposed to behaviour of a discriminatory nature.

Within this, there are difficulties so few of us are capable of admitting: sensory processing issues, hypersensitivity, hyper-vigilance, conditioning, and of course, blind spots—and that’s just how our brains interpret information. 

That’s not to mention the multitude of mental health struggles which can usually accompany these things, most seemingly stemming in some way from trauma, passed along or created by trauma, received and distorted by trauma, and dismissed as though trauma doesn’t matter… and on we go: a domino contagion of emotion and behaviour, some of us blind and pointing, and some of us too blinded by the light we’ve seen or been forced to dim. So we stay in darkness until we can stand it again.

 

7 Deviance from Obedience

 

‘Be a good girl.’ Define good. Define girl. Better yet, let me define myself.

‘Be cool.’ Define cool. Better yet, tell me that cool is something other than you wanting it your way.

The next deviation looked like rebellion. I was deviating further from people-pleasing. I stopped catering to others’ expectations, and I was challenging the behaviours which caused overrides in my system. When my refusal to submit was met as defiance, there was escalation.  

This cycle of so-called deviant behaviour creates conflicts with self and autonomy as well as the more obvious external relational conflict.

For me, this often resulted in further masking instead of a genuine correction of the behaviour borne out of understanding, simply because the imposed expectation did not align with my values or beliefs. It took a long time and lot of examination to be satisfied that my core values and beliefs were worth hanging onto even when faced with the group dynamics of toxic masculinity. My early compliance seems to be due to a fluctuating need for approval and societal acceptance borne out of early parent-child relationships and exacerbated by early exposure to toxic male attention. This led to subsequent submission or rebellion. 

Often, a repeated ‘deviant’ behaviour within emotional dysregulation is exacerbated by harmful environments (even within rehabilitation) and an inability or lack of trust can create antisocial tendencies and mental health complications, further impacting social perception. 

A perceived lack of societal acceptance, particularly from those seeking control, led to increasingly deviant behaviour and further punishment within wider social systems. Even on a small scale, this had a devastating and primarily invisible impact.

What is inside of us doesn’t stay buried. It’s been insisted that I’m not as good as people believed I was pretending to be, and yet even under the strangest, most confusing and heartbreaking torment, beneath what my body couldn’t control, my ‘goodness’ insists who I am. I know myself. Adopting false beliefs at my most vulnerable changed who I knew myself to be. Returning to trust in myself restored me.

The process is neverending. The self-doubt threatens almost as much as the world does. Trusting myself is key to resilience, is key to being true, staying real—existing as myself. Only in defiance did I find the strength to trust myself enough to reach some of the conclusions other people tried to draw for me. It’s not enough to simply be told who you are even if some of those things are truths. When some of those things do not ring true because a lie is already feeding a rooted false belief, it’s ever more important to weigh it all.

For me, it became clear that the way forward is to step back to gain perspective. This looks like isolation, and it is. It is a necessity.

The assumption that deficit of any kind is where others say it is or isn’t is a grave mistake. A debilitating one. One that reinforces itself when put into practice, creating a self-fulfilled prophecy that is an ego stroke for the assumer. 

My deviance was a direct rejection of that assumption and a fierce self-advocacy of my struggles, my autonomy, my right to have a voice. I won’t apologise for that any more. A person shouldn’t be expected to practice self-control when they are being controlled by someone or something else. It’s unrealistic. 

It cannot be assumed that a person always has a choice if the extent of the situation is not known. If they don’t have the autonomy—or even the courage to act autonomously, this assumption adds burden and frustration to an intense and fragile situation. Oppression does things to a person that those who are lucky enough not to know, will never understand unless the oppressed eventually finds the courage to speak.

I’m speaking and writing about my oppression and everything within it, whether I have permission or not. 

Retaliation from others was inevitable.

Breaking down as a result of retaliation has become an unfortunate normality, but change is upon those who retaliate. I know this because it’s been a while since my last breakdown. My change holds, which means the truth is breaking through. 

To say or write too much feels reckless and yet there is freedom in speaking up. As I do this in  areas of my life, that truth is reinforced. I want to bear this in mind as I go forward.

Believing you are right even while surrounded by others who challenge your conviction is not necessarily an indication one way or the other. What are any of us willing to stand up for? I think the key here is having examined enough of the facts to know whether or not that conviction stands. I think it is important also to understand that these things can shift and that there is always room for error.

Humans seem to deviate from the norm because of discrepancies within the environment. Removal from the environment and placement into another does not fix the issues… it contributes to them. That’s true on many levels. Yet, sometimes, the change in environment is enough to allow development in some areas, while halting it in others. The stalls negate the positives prior to visible change.

Acceptance and approval of the self while undergoing inner change is crucial. This then extends outward. It’s clear to me having experienced it that those who cannot extend it might not be incapable of inner change but could instead be under too much external pressure and expectation, which decreases autonomy. I would compare this to a child who does not respond well to requests if dysregulated or is feeling too oppressed.

That’s not to reduce any adult individual to a child, but rather to point out that our minds develop in pace with allowance; if we have not had ample time and space to do so, it doesn’t mean we have a ‘child’s brain’ (that remark is derogatory and diminishing and serves no purpose in a healing space) but rather that we have to treat ourselves with the patience we would treat a child, if indeed we are capable of that. I’d say many of us are capable of doing that even when we cannot extend that same kindness towards ourselves.

The differences between the capacity to treat a child well and not being able to treat a child well is a marker not just of emotional state, intelligence, and ability to reason but being able to employ these things in a way which overrides learned or mimicked behaviour even in dysregulation.

Noting these things becomes increasingly important as regressive states resurface for the individual in trauma recovery who is struggling with meeting their needs, completing a task, and managing the sensory input from the environment, other individuals, or direct and intentional interference as a result of stigma, ignorance, and discrimination.

I can write about these things because I struggle or have struggled with these things myself. Writing about it offers me clarity I otherwise wouldn’t be able to hold onto in the midst of it all, and it’s clarity that saves me, that keeps my voice strong, and my intentions strong when there is too much influence from the outside world, parading as ‘obedience’.

 

8 Deviance from the Perception of Normal

 

Eventually the question shifted from obedience to something deeper: what counts as normal at all?

Deviance is seen everywhere in the world, but when a majority accepts these behaviours as normality, it can perpetuate the problem or it can offset a problem. 

There is deviance in environments where boundaries are blurred: where adults and children co-mingle without full understanding of impact, where excessive consumption of alcohol and weed are normalised, and exposure to overtly sexual behaviour and inappropriate language impacts development.

This includes social grooming of the kind I was exposed to as a child/teenager, which can pave the way for exploitation, stripping vulnerability down to diminished capacity within close relationships. 

There is deviance in coerciveness, aggression, and violence to varying degrees, and these tactics are used to gain compliance and obedience resulting in a submissive stance and complacency on the other end of a power grab. 

There is deviance from the statistical norm in neurodivergence like autism, ADHD, and related traits in some of us who have a history of trauma. Some of mine, and I don’t disclose these lightly, are for instance: my tendency to notice patterns in society, my preference for organisation over chaos, my vast inner world (endless monologue, ‘writer brain’, quotes, references, lyrics on demand, and abstract association). I am generally quite facetious when not activated and I’ll likely chuckle when faced with a sudden dramatic event if I’m already overwhelmed because that’s the kind of ‘socially inappropriate’ response my brain might default to in certain settings under certain conditions. Physiologically, it calms my nervous system and helps me tackle the situation. That’s only the tip of a single iceberg, and life experience tells me this is a deviance from what is typical.

This perception as deviant is what creates a struggle, and there is deviance in the way people with these struggles are often treated, one way or the other. 

Depending on how a person is treated, it can determine how that person might respond to life. Given too polarised a response from society on any scale, this might also influence a person, at the root: from brain hardwiring and personality to the potentially fruitful ability to make a simple decision without having a meltdown.

That reflects the power the society majority holds and abuses while demanding more freedom and claiming the freedom of those with less.

 

9 Societal Distortions of Harmful and Benign Deviance

 

It is important to distinguish between deviant behaviour which is harmful to others versus self-harming deviant behaviour and benign forms. It is interesting to note that the latter two types seem to derive from inflicted societal pressure, often through deviancy of the first type.

What I’ve observed (outwardly and within myself) is that being subjected to harmful deviancy can create harmful behaviour that would otherwise not emerge. This is not about deflecting blame. It comes down to a few important questions.

How many more of us are willing to raise children who go against their natural sense of who we are as humans out of distorted obedience or a shared distortion of responsibility to uphold what looks good for our neighbours?

Is it harmful to say as much? 

Is it? Or is it more harmful to turn the other cheek to this harmful deviance while punishing the benign simply because it makes a person slightly more awkward than is comfortable for traditional societal expectation?

Some of these issues of harmful deviance might have derived and are enduring because of a lack of agency, a sense of helplessness, a need to gain and prove autonomy, capability, and independence. In these ways, majority or minority, we are the same. Some of this is rooted in and borne out of slavery mentality and generational trauma from exposure to colonial rule, missionary control, military occupation, and economic dependency. For those from an island community like the one I was born into, these things still weigh heavily, even when unnamed.

From my perspective as a mixed-race individual, an inferiority complex seems to stem from this history of unacceptable behaviour thrust upon us then surging among us. We remain shadowed in the entitlement and privilege and authority of ‘the other side’ even as we pretend there are no sides—just as long as we remember which side we must stick to.

These things are often transferred or perceived so when an individual from our community is presented with an opportunity. The perceived or real privileges rub against scarcity mindsets and standard envy of those ‘left behind’ even though there are those of us who wouldn’t wish to be anywhere else. It creates additional and ongoing challenges within adjustment on all sides.

Here, there, everywhere, conflict on the gaps between allowances, opportunities, social standing, education, etc. is amplified on a scale of family feuding to the collective. It creates further division: another instance of us versus them in regards to those on- or off-island, and a false sense of entitlement and boundary among any (islanders or others) who view us as outsiders when the fact of the matter (worldwide) could be boiled down to a playground-level remark of ‘you started it’. While it might do very little towards resolving the issue, it does highlight the fact that we have been explorers and settlers since the dawn of time.

My position as an immigrant suffering from racial discrimination which differs in official inclusion versus practical exclusion. This is about geographical relocation; racial hatred just hasn’t yet caught up with the citizenship granted to the entire island in the year 2000 or the simple fact that the island was invaded and claimed by the British decades ago.

Is it so difficult to accept that it is simply responsible to grant fair living conditions to more of their citizens? Why should any of us suffer racial abuse for simply for having colouration and temperament more befitting of the warmer clime, and generational trauma from the less than optimal living conditions we have endured for hundreds of years? Personal responsibility doesn’t shift to a single person simply because that’s where the spotlight currently lands. 

Enduring hardship is one thing. Enduring abuse because of a misconception is another matter, especially when help offered to those of us who suffer is debated within society, even though those same benefits are inclusive of those who have a problem with sharing resources.

These divisive dynamics breed unhealthy competitiveness, prolong scarcity mindsets, cause an antisocially-informed stance of tearing down others whether in attack or defence, and ultimately create resentment and anger among those who feel hard-done by. It creates an impression that those of us who achieve things don’t deserve it even if we’ve worked for it; or that those of us whose families have struggled to build what they have from the ground up don’t get to enjoy the rewards it brings; or that those of us who leave get to leave our problems behind as though we’re not faced with brand-new problems; or that those of us who cannot work, cannot remove our struggles, or escape our pasts do not deserve help when we do. 

The perception upheld by those who believe their struggle is greater is one in which someone else’s life is magically transformed by whatever support someone else does not have. 

 That perception insists that someone who has a set of circumstances different than their own must now sit in castles and palaces and are being fed grapes by some clone of our former selves, as though resentment, envy, and anger directed outward will somehow resolve the imbalance. 

These things are not exclusive to a single community, culture, or race.

Suffering looks different on each of us. The double bind of keeping it together while falling apart is why conceivable proof is almost impossible to provide to anyone. To those who don’t yet understand the boundaries which prohibit their perceived right to question a person’s suffering, the proof would be a lifelong endeavour I am not willing to concede to. 

How much more of this back and forth can we stand within society? Acknowledging blame and accepting it seems far rarer than how often it is misdirected. 

I fit within a minority, even if within that minority, I’ve never felt like I belonged anywhere, and yet within that position, I recognise that I am privileged in ways others aren’t. I also recognise that these privileges pale by comparison with others I perceive to be more fortunate than I am, but were I to compare and do nothing about changing my position where I am able to, or to not seek support for and during the aspects and times I cannot change it, I would be at risk of creating more hardship. To direct my frustration at those perceived to be more fortunate is to risk creating more hardship for someone who might be privileged but still struggling. Both these things can occur simultaneously. Lately, and historically, too, misconceptions within minority movements give licence for dangerous deviations that harm. Yes, the minorities suffer, more so than the majority in many ways and my experience attests to that, but suffering is part of the human condition, and to dismiss that fact too readily is to become self-entitled. In an over-eagerness to right what is wrong in the wrong ways, advocates for one cause can often adopt the role of the oppressor. Those who sit between the lines (and let’s consider that: don’t we all in one way or another?) might find it difficult to decide which side deserves support, respect, and acknowledgment. My stance is this: stop looking at whose ‘side’ deserves more attention, stop polarising the situation, and focus on the individual without reducing any of it to extremes. What does the individual need? What does the individual struggle with? What does the individual suffer from, specifically, and what does the individual think about these things?

Privilege is yet another perception. What we perceive as privilege and success differs based on our values. What we need should be based on who we are as individuals. Coveting what someone else has is simply an invitation for a different set of problems. That isn’t what equality is or should be about.

 

10 The Individual Within the Group

 

Understanding these patterns is one thing. Living inside them is another.

One of my early mistakes in life was in assuming that the people around me were well-intentioned. Not all of them were. This was a naivety, one that a child should be able to retain for a short while before shedding it like a second skin, fully adjusting to the horrors of the world as well as its beauty.

This paved the way for the outlook I maintained long into adulthood. I can see the horror (so to speak) but there is an underlying insistence that there is a reasonable explanation for it, that underneath the horror exists a neutrality that has simply been activated by an external horror. It’s what makes me forgiving. It’s what lends me compassion and empathy. It’s also what has had me eyeball to eyeball with danger before realising what it was. 

Without being fully aware of it at the time, I repeatedly sought out these patterns. Even when not actively seeking, these patterns have found their way back into my life. Sometimes, I’ve succumbed. Other times, I’ve rejected them. Always, I’m fascinated by them. I’m fascinated by the dynamics at play, often convinced that I can withstand the emotional fallout, that I can navigate a situation for what it is, and figure out how to be within it, around it, without having everything fall apart. 

It’s less about arrogance and more about hope. 

Hope might seem like a privilege but I’ve found that even in the most despairing of situations, there seems to be a fluttering of hope that pushes humans through extreme adversity. It’s clear that even when the motives and values of people are different, hope persists. It shows up in different ways and at different stages, but it does arrive. 

I’m grateful that my family values instilled this persistence but I’m equally aware that persistence and resilience is inherently human and that there are different ways to arrive at the same place, or to return to it. It’s easy to assume that who we are and what we have been through determines how hopeful or positive we are but it seems to depend on where we are in our journey. 

My journey, to the outsider, might have appeared halted. 

What could seem like lack of progression was actually exploration beneath the surface. It was a necessity, not an indulgence. It is a crucial stage in recovery. Setbacks in growth or healing occur when misperception does: when outsider perspectives overrule truth.

Personally, when several people took liberties with my privacy, violated my boundaries, made their remarks on my personal life in an invasive and unsolicited way while I was deep into the very early stages of trauma recovery, I became more tenacious, more desperate to cling to who I know I am.

I admit most of my failings and feelings. Most people don’t. Many people assume everyone lies as much as they do in whatever proportion this might be, and they are often complacent about this. I assumed for a long time that people were more honest than they actually are. I was wrong. Whether it’s incompetence or an intentional error, people will often lie about which it is and I’m not excluding myself from this. I understand the defensive position we take as humans, and naturally, given our experiences, the responses can be inevitable. 

The defensive position taken by smaller communities, further complicated by close connections, enmeshment, and an overzealous and grouped approach in defence, seems to stem from over-personalisation, misplaced loyalty, and inflated pride.

I made several observations while I was working through my experiences. These observations expanded into the community, the environment in which I was raised and the experiences I had within it. These observations, as I shared them with my partner, were taken on a deeply personal level by others who had previously intervened. These were private matters at the time, but given the blurred boundary lines, an aspect I was given no control in, these matters became a topic for debate because it didn’t only reflect my situation and my life but theirs, too. 

Even though several of my observations were more anthropological in nature, and even though these observations were made privately, the backlash received came en masse—unwarranted and viciously personal, and often using deviations of truth as a weapon. 

Given the tendencies of the community, the tendencies of hurt humans, the tendencies of who we are in a triggered state, who we are in defence mode, this was amplified by the need to start a wildfire in retaliation—a tendency I find foreign on account of being something of an outcast. I’ve never really had the ‘privilege’ of starting such an event because I’ve felt mismatched for most of life, and maybe, in hindsight, I’m grateful for that: for my inwardly isolated position. 

My ‘privately’ unabashed exploration into how and why I’ve been shaped the way I am was taken as an inability to focus inwardly when actually my discoveries were an extension of exactly that. I have been looking at the root cause of something and laying blame or fault where it belongs without renouncing my own. The truth has not and does not renounce personal responsibility—or as they put it “get you off the hook.” The idea that it does is just that: an idea in someone else’s mind.

So many members of the community seemed to feel targeted by mere observations that they took uncalled and undue action against my personal endeavour of growth and healing. To say their behaviour towards me caused setbacks is an injustice in itself of a diminishing nature.

What followed was nothing short of a roast. They started a wildfire like an angry mob (crowd amplification) and directed years of their own confusion and frustration my way because I had the audacity to observe a pattern throughout history and simply speak it aloud. Without context, some of the things I’ve said, some of the things that tangled themselves along the grapevine would naturally have caused offence if misunderstood, but more importantly, it should have raised concerns.

Instead, they badgered me with hurtful remarks about my personal life and my family. They deflected every attempt I made to reason, distracted and diverted any attempt to explain, and derailed any attempt to disengage. They instructed me to accept responsibility all while taking offence to my reminder that they had abandoned responsibility of their own. It was the most harmful kind of intervention. 

Those who sought insight into my character led with bluffs and bullying, purposefully using social status to first coerce or bully, establish loyalty, then using that position to undermine me. It changed me. It derailed me and disintegrated my projects, my psyche, and overall health. 

As dark as the intervention and harassment became, this deception was the worst. 

Those who adopted a group mentality against the remarks I made about our culture still seemed keen to honour my character in the ways they were able to, and amidst the hostility, these brief moments of relief led me to disclose many things I’d kept close. It unleashed chaos for those involved, leading to more feuding, more duplicity, and a general sense of mistrust among us.

This is not unheard of even in controlled studies of small communities. I have barely begun to peruse the available information on research carried out within island cultures, but what is clear is that historically, the damage outweighs the benefits. The events that unfolded in and around my life (and beyond) resonate with the fallout described in an overview of island research, fallout so great that equal measures have since been put in place to protect those who are being studied. There have been no such protective measures in place for the events that reduced me to a guinea pig or lab rat in someone else’s idea of a social experiment. 

Locally, people involved themselves as the situation escalated. These things initially unfolded over the course of lockdown during the Covid pandemic, a time that had many people climbing the walls to escape self-examination. Finding entertainment if little else in the situation in my home was a form of that escapism.

Had my privacy been respected, much of this could have been avoided. People have since responded to what was, in its essence, lingering private thoughts that continued to be verbalised in the heat of their pursuit.

Private thoughts are allowed to be messy, they’re allowed to hold the potential to offend, they’re allowed to be somewhat inconsiderate of reception because they’re private thoughts.

Delving into the private thoughts of another person holds its own danger. Reacting to those thoughts without seeking context, or reflection of one’s own, without recognition that it might hold truth, or primarily, that a violation is occurring gives the accountability these other persons are trying to force upon the first very little merit. It showcases the deeply unsettling framework of the psyches of those who violated my privacy.

Since then, I’ve been verbally flogged. I’ve been reprimanded for being undesirable in every sense of the word. I’ve been made a scapegoat, an example, a spectacle, for simply defending a worthy position.

Don’t mistake defence for personality.

During the course of it all, in moments of weakness, I stepped back from truths: things I know are true enough that they stand alone. My need for approval, my need to fit in, my need to please — those things previously impacted my ability to stand alone with my convictions, and people have been reacting one way or another to my reinforced stance, expecting perhaps submission, agreeability, and indeed, more remorse than is necessary, more humility than is worthy, more apologies where there should be one coming my way. 

My rediscovered independence lends me strength. To incur the wrath of a community I have always wanted to fit within, to incur the morbid curiosity and moral deviation of a community I once felt safely anonymous within, made sense once I had overcome the emotional fallout of being so severely and finally cast out by the majority. Yet, within that, it made clear something that had been taking place covertly all of my life. It solidifies within me the conviction I have held since childhood: that sense of wrongness and cover-ups, of lies and duplicity, and the brushing of important things under carpets that mustn’t be disturbed, of those things being exactly what I perceived them to be. 

That in itself restored my faith and self-trust at a time I needed it most: on the brink of motherhood. So many have taken things I’ve said and turned it back onto my family out of spite and a sense of righteousness, one-upmanship, and lack of awareness, as if our family and I have made claims to be problem-free. Some have suggested we are relatively problem-free, making a fuss of nothing, essentially dismissing our struggle—all while pointing the finger at problems, fictitious or otherwise. 

So many were seemingly willing to sully themselves out of a sense of togetherness, of misplaced community spirit, regardless of which community it was borne out of. If that spirit had not been misplaced, it would be well and good… but those things swept beneath rugs, buried in secrecy, bred in gossip and bias, are eventually unearthed and must be dealt with to avoid perpetuation through the generations and through the communities in which we live. 

These things are not prevalent in one culture above another; they are prevalent throughout society. Small communities simply create a Petri dish to place a well-aimed magnifier, and too often, those beneath it are burned.

There is strength in my refusal to not let go of what happened until I have had a fair chance to portray what it was like on the inside of this abusive witch hunt. Some believe I’m starting something. But is it, really? 

Is it starting a fire or is it refusing to burn?

The efforts of many of those who ‘advocate’ and ‘police’ serve mainly to vent their pent-up frustrations and tear down the efforts of those at whom they’re directed. It perpetuates power dynamics. It attempts to keep some of us in ‘our place’ when really it also elevates someone else’s place. ‘Our place’ is simply the position we are desired to remain in.

Mindset alone does not fix an issue, and it does not make a task any easier to achieve, but it does keep a person determined to rise above harassment, bullying, and abuse. It took me a long time to do this. It’s more difficult to do in a close community, when you know the identity of the bully, when the bully might hypothetically be a friend or a spouse or your grandmother’s cousin, or your boyfriend’s mother, or an otherwise upstanding citizen you might once have been incapable of sinking to the low point of playground warfare with. 

It’s equally difficult when there are deviants involved who mimic the behaviour and patterns of those you know. 

There is added complexity when there are racial and status elements involved, when discrimination is unconquerable because it is rooted in power and there is so little power allowed to those of us who are ‘different’. It’s more difficult to assert your own needs and opinions when faced with someone you respect(ed), or when it’s someone you feel inferior to, or someone you love or are loved by, but especially, when it’s someone or something you fear. 

Difficult as these things are, left undone, we can find ourselves propelled by society, controlled by others, open to exploitation, vulnerable as the naked children we’re often reduced to, respecting those who have no respect for us or any obvious human decency. 

We all deserve respect.

What we go through in life is hard, no matter who we are, and we cannot assume that a person has it better or worse than another unless they tell us so and even then, maybe they’re masking to take up less space, so it’s safer just to be kind to the secret battles they may face. That is something I’ve held to for most of my life. 

It changed when the community offered no such refuge for me. It became impossible to show any kind of compassion inwardly or externally when their harassment of me and stigma towards and against me was the equivalent of being burned alive. Some of them were so malicious with expressed intent of showing me ‘what bullying really is’, ‘what suffering really is’ as if I had not suffered enough, as if I had not been violated enough, as if my existence wasn’t proof enough. 

I no longer had the strength to respond in a characteristic way because of what I had endured. People say this is where true strength is. In this moment, I was weak. My strength is in acknowledging this weakness and still returning to who I am in spite of this lapse. My strength is also in understanding that prolonged cruelty forces a person to adapt, creating someone who is then ‘deserving of punishment’ and creating an outlet for someone (or several people) to unleash what is buried within them. 

I was being re-punished for something that was already punishment enough. I was being re-parented by outsiders as though I hadn’t had my fill of it or as though I was incapable of doing the task myself. And in the midst of it, I was being bullied by those who (still) tuck away their inner conflict with more shame than I did, those who believed only they had suffered ‘enough’, who monopolised suffering and deemed my suffering pale. They suffer knowledge gaps that demand to be filled but seem unlikely because their lack of trust is so consuming. It seems that unless it is done in tandem with someone who has experienced a similar thing, this learning is inconceivable. This trauma bond, this similarity, is a glaring beacon that so few were willing to let me acknowledge in them because it also meant an acknowledgment of my pain, and their punishment of me for ‘not understanding’ would have lost its flimsy justification. That is an example of the treatment I have endured from others.

I acknowledge that I still experience anger about what has happened. My anger resides in a few places. 

One is where I have accepted my blame for my actions and others still refuse to. They fail to admit it and fail to acknowledge how their actions steered the outcome through invalidation. Another is their denial that the truth within my observations exists. Disbelief or even feigned disbelief has caused damage. Their disbelief extended to my understanding, my parenting, my writing, my relationships—feeding Imposter Syndrome, and further attempting to undermine personal effort.

Another aspect I feel anger about is in how my capacity and eventual failure to maintain politeness in the face of bullying, and my etiquette in the middle of a nervous breakdown has been used as a baseline for judging me. I find that concept and expectation unacceptable. It’s an impossible standard and it creates a dynamic where anything I do is damnable; if I behave calmly, my suffering is diminished. If I react strongly, my credibility is attacked. It’s a double bind; in other words: I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t.

When I stopped talking, people began questioning my competency and intelligence. When I talked, people questioned my intellect and claimed that I was reciting from memory instead of having understanding. They’ve claimed that others wrote my books, that I’ve cheated my way through life (even though I have very little to show for it if I had—which I didn’t.)

After a while of enduring the prolonged abuse, my speech became so broken it appeared to confirm their theories, but the truth of the matter was that their bullying reduced me to something they could once more control, effectively silencing me from speaking truths they didn’t wish to face.

When I didn’t speak, others pressured me to speak up. When I spoke up, others didn’t like what I said. Collectively, they’ve been trying to ‘correct’ me since, and what I’ve found is that the ‘correct’ way to ‘be’ has actually been who I was all along, before others conditioned me, before fear pinned me beneath them.

It has been my experience that people will try to keep you in a position that is lower than they perceive themselves. They often disguise their input as aid, even if that input is actually harmful. My repeated attempts to rise above this resulted in a breakdown of some relationships. It took immense strength to rise anyway and go on without those relationships. ‘It is better to be hated for what you are, than to be loved for what you are not.’ (André Gide) The peace I find within this quote comes from the knowledge inside of me that who I am is decent and good enough.

Why was there such duplicity? And why were there so few willing to find out more without breaking more boundaries or even stepping over those already torn down? Was status so important a value that hands could not be sullied with such trivialities as facts?

I don’t mean to shun the help that was offered alongside, and it’s not that I am ungrateful for the help I’ve received. It’s that I am expected to smile politely and accept help which isn’t actually beneficial. It’s made more difficult that the way in which help was offered was triggering on a level that put my nervous system in overdrive, and there were people who found entertainment within that. There were those who relished my discomfort, my upset, who drove it forward, purposefully causing harm, delaying recovery, and further implicating me in the process. 

What kind of person does this? Under what circumstances does a person think it is okay to do that? These questions haunt me. These events haunt me. Nothing I’ve done warrants the level of retaliation I received. I checked. I rechecked. It doesn’t balance, and this disturbs me in a way I wish it didn’t. It comes back to yet one more violation. I’ve found myself on the receiving end of too many of them, and these questions plague me because I’m trying to make my peace with other humans, trying to trust enough to venture back into society, and I cannot bring myself to do so because I’m consistently reminded that people do these things without it being deserved.

Someone simply, randomly, decides that they’ll dish out punishment for something that does not directly affect them, except in the way that it already exists, and the balance is further thrown off. They judge without context. They punish without authority. It adds to chaos which existed within the matter to begin with, not offsetting it, not preventing it, not fixing it, but exacerbating it, and that people around me found this to be a form of entertainment, to weigh in in the ways they did, harassment en masse… it highlights a deficit of emotional intelligence I cannot fathom, and with it comes a lingering resentment that me and mine have been incorrectly stuck with a devolution label that belong on those who slapped it on us.

When I made this observation years ago, movements were made for ‘inclusivity’. I use speech marks in this instance because the inclusivity was not made for progressive or positive purposes. It was done to make a point. It became clear within those instances, following a series of events during which I broke down several times (not just in tears), that for those who treated me like a test subject on reality TV, it was less about cultural differences and more closely related to trauma, and specifically, their inability to display compassion even when witnessing vulnerability, instead finding highs and entertainment within the suffering of others. The inclusivity consisted of a targeted disintegration of my fragile sense of trust so that I began dismissing vulnerability myself, believing signs of it to be just one more act — a setup to make a further example out of me.

While there is karmic truth within the human condition and experience, there is an imbalance, and sociopathic patterns are often at the centre of it. Personally, I received extreme social punishment for a bout of temporarily bad behaviour after a lifetime of mostly niceness and decency. There are those who go unpunished despite a track record of a lifetime of anti-social leanings. What I’ve noticed within this, while enduring extreme harassment and navigating through a problematic relationship, is that many of us who display antisocial behaviour have themselves been shaped by harm. 

When I initially had these thoughts in defence of my partner a long while ago, and then later, myself, more people began to pressure me, many of them claiming I was trying to ‘get off the hook’, while others seemed to be approaching from a similar position, perhaps ‘on a hook’ themselves. When we think about the proverbial hook, the hook is attached to something, and very few people pay attention to what is on the other end of it because when faced with that kind of behaviour, it comes down to that individual accepting personal responsibility. So often, the source of what causes that behaviour is overlooked, and where a person cannot correct the behaviour despite continued efforts to do so, it can be because of prolonged abuse or circumstances preventing them from doing so.

This is assuming that effort is being made and this is not to enable harmful behaviour; this is within the interest of understanding and solving relational difficulties, and maybe shedding light on why a person deviates in harmful ways to begin with. A lot of the time, if there is a pattern, especially within a community as small as the one I was born into, there is clear enough insight that goes beyond coincidence. (The downside of a small community is the sheer breadth (and lack of depth) of speculation.) The conflicts that arise between generations as we learn more about ourselves, as we become less isolated, less remote, as we stop feeling the pressure from shame, and the sense of disloyalty that comes with individuation and dissent from tradition, as we find the courage to step into ourselves and step outside of the dynamics that bind us, we can better see what kept us on a hook, what keeps others on those same hooks, and little by little, I guess it is up to every single person to decide for themselves how they want to proceed. 

My system re-adapted to survive the extreme environment—not because that’s who I am. The temporary nature of that adaptive state tells me as much.

How many of those of us who deviate, or have deviated in whatever way, continue to do so? How many will seek out scapegoats and which of us will stare ourselves in the eye and challenge ourselves to stand our ground with integrity alone? 

Who are you?

Decide.

 

11 More Than a Victim

 

These things broke me. Everything seemed broken. I felt broken, too—I wouldn’t bend to their will. I refused. I stood up for myself in whatever way I had to, then. And still, I ended up twisted. Bent. They found their way in. And I fractured in resistance. And it isn’t unique to me. It occurs generation after generation. 

Kaleidoscope funhouse fragments of myself twisted together—partner, would-be parent, child.

Mind the glass. You might see your reflection.

The patterns remain. Even in the afterlife and aftermath of a so-called friendship, a person who has used and abused you will continue to find ways to keep doing it, even against protective boundaries. If there’s an unwanted pattern in the tapestry of my life, the only measure left is to cut it out—it means inevitably losing some friendships for the greater good. I can think of several people who would approve even though I’m past the point of needing that approval.

I think it’s important to recognise when someone is making an effort to break the pattern, and important to acknowledge when someone is being deliberately derailed to appear as though efforts are not being made. It’s both clear and important to keep in mind that these things often link together.

I succumbed to many a thing over the course of my life, some of them under the influence of friends. 

No more. 

When we grow up and really move on, we expect sadness and fallout, but backlash… attacks…? Only now do I realise how integrated this is within the patterns and dynamics between me and those I once followed.

Truth takes its time. It’s winning. 

Slow and steady does it.

Have you ever felt like a ‘knitted community’ mostly makes for more ‘yarn’, all the more likely to tangle us up? Have you ever felt like the yarn of the community is a noose around your neck? 

I have.

Turning the other cheek had me turning in circles. 

Why does a (mostly) decent person turn against their peers, reject help, and temporarily let go of social norms?

When those same peers offer help that isn’t helpful and show no understanding or respect for privacy. To retain sanity. To preserve the truth. To maintain the core values of the self. 

There are two sides. On one end, there is over-validation and intrusive and unnecessary assistance. On the other side, there is extreme invalidation: those who believe it’s not bad and won’t help at all, who shame, ridicule, and mock, and tote their own struggle like a banner of justification for ableism unless the struggle looks exactly like their own. Both hinders growth and organic processing, stubs out peace of mind and creative thinking—unless you’re as stubborn as I am.

I have come to realise that there is not a space in which I can exist without judgement and it tore apart the fabric of who I am.

These days, I try to take judgement the way I take advice: 

If it seems like it comes from a place of shared experience, maybe there is merit. 

If it seems like it’s too removed from where and who I am, it probably is. 

If it’s altogether toxic, that’s less about me and likely to have some distortion. 

If it isn’t helpful, I try to let it go. 

If it persists, I try to remember this throughout: my own judgement counts.

I am valid.

This space is for myself. I’m reminding myself of that: this little blank space in which I type my thoughts.

Does it resonate with anyone? Will it ever?

Maybe, maybe not.

What I know is that I don’t want to cater to anyone. I want to simply show up. I want to find courage in expression in the way I used to. So many are lost, reaching out, trying to be the right thing for someone else. I’ve done this. But now, I want to be right for myself first of all, and what follows will be truer.

This is me over-explaining, feeling selfish, and judged, for having the audacity to make a thing about myself. But if not here, where? If not in life, when? I cannot be everything to everyone. No one can. I don’t have that expectation and I don’t want it thrust upon me either.

I’m just another person trying to live. I’m not so special. I’m not so desperate or different. The masks I’ve put on tell several other stories, not just my own. Those masks have protected me. The lies they seem to represent are merely lies we uphold in society for reasons we have all begun questioning more than ever. The truth is there, if your lens works the way it (probably) should.

I tried to blend in. To fit. It’s a natural enough urge that doesn’t always benefit ourselves, if we squish ourselves too much to simply belong. That’s what much of socialising feels like to me—squishing myself. It really does take longer these days to decompress.

There are people who thrive on doing the squishing. I’ve known several. I’m still broken in places because of those people—and I’ve done my share, too. I found I was at my worst after having gone through the worst even though that process was delayed. The difference is the thriving… I have not thrived on another’s pain. Others have. They like shiny reflective spaces and people to deflect that fact. My shine eventually wore off.

It’s been harder to connect with myself when I’ve been blocked on all sides by people telling me who I am, or was, or will be.

I find it hard to let go of my inner demons because those same demons have kept me safe enough when life was not safe. These demons are beliefs about myself. Some of them are false. Others are distortions of truth. Others are rooted in emotion. When the world feels a little safer, is a little safer, maybe when cruel people stop feeding the so-called monsters inside, when they stop riling the fighting instincts of the beast just to criticise the anguished roars, and instead let us tame ourselves, let us choose peace, let us be hopeful without mocking the effort, let us cry without shaming the act, let us speak without correcting our dialect, let us live without severe scrutiny and discrimation… maybe then, the ‘demons’ can rest.

 

12 Un/Becoming Under Pressure

 

Trying to let go of too much of myself caused a rift that created space for others to fill, much like an unfiltered newsfeed. I buried too much of myself with the fractured pieces of myself. Now, I’m all together again, more or less.

I’m appreciating my complexity more than I ever have. I’m less afraid to utilise the skills I have. I’m less ashamed to give myself attention and care. I tolerate less bullshit and maybe that makes me a little less fun, but it helps me show up as myself for myself which helps me to show up for those I cherish.

Instead of taking the cruelty of others and continuing to turn it inward, I’m dealing with it, openly, a little at a time, and in a better way. My initial attempts at this were to give it back, to match the energy, to mimic. I’m grateful that my learning curve there is not as steep as it could be.

I no longer have as much of a backlog of others’ cruelty just sitting there from all those times before where I took it without giving a response. That undoes a person. The things which go unaddressed, forgotten by others, dismissed by ourselves, it spirals in the mind until we run out of ways to hold it in.

Compartmentalising works but only to an extent. Decluttering has to occur. It brings me back to the importance (for me) of journalling, of expression: writing in any form, art, recording voice memos to myself, dancing (when chronic pain allows). There are other things too perhaps but I’ve never truly had the confidence for much else. I haven’t been able to use the outlet in the same way I could with writing. It’s because writing used to be a private undertaking. When this changed, when I was robbed of privacy and space, it didn’t only give people an advantage they shouldn’t have had, it also robbed me of my outlet.

It robbed me of my voice—not just in writing but in my actual ability to speak. That broke me down. While down, the entertainment continued… I was used as little more than a puppet, showcasing to others what they were so willing to believe, all the while as so few showed compassion for nuance and fluctuations, perhaps because the satisfaction of tearing down a person who offended them with a truth was an override too great to overcome.

The difficulty in other people overanalysing a person as a group is that there are multiple blind spots which are reinforced by one another. Blind spots not just of a person or people in general but in this case (given how alien I often felt in the community I grew up in for common interests like a love of literature) the (ironically) literal tendencies of those who have not explored abstract outlets led them to believe that fiction is fact and that fact might be fiction.

They confused the two, and in the process, confused me, themselves, and others. The influence these people held when it came to interpretation and influenced perception by others of me is terrifying, or at least, within regression, it was. 

Outside of regression, I’m hopeful that people have individual mindsets, free of enmeshed and hive or herd mentalities, that they are open to other possibilities. I’m hopeful that these in turn can help undo some of the damage.

That’s not to say I’m prone or not prone to these mindsets. That’s not to say that anyone is less than anyone else because of cultural differences or hardships. It is merely an acknowledgement — an observation. That’s kind of all it ever has been… until it wasn’t. Backlash within what should have been a private realisation and nothing more, turned observations into conflict that might have been avoided if I’d been respected as a whole person instead of a broken one.

I’m being careful not to use ‘a big brush when I paint’, and I’m trying not to cover in paint those who have purposefully taken steps away from that which is harmful, myself included. Those who persist and pursue me too closely as I try to work out my own issues, personal issues which should be given due privacy, issues which should be given respect, are those who end up getting splashed with the paint they so desperately want me to stop painting with. 

And yet, I have a right to self-express if I can do so safely. Those who are close enough to get splashed are likely those who are stepping beyond a boundary. 

It is likely that they might continue to find problems with me raising issues instead of addressing the issue itself. 

These are many of the people I once found myself in the same boat with, my ship temporarily abandoned. On re-captaining my own vessel, these same people have come aboard and declared mutiny because there is either: still an overwhelming sense of duty to the cover-up when my destination has been marked for truth; or there is an overwhelming need and self-justified duty for someone else to take charge and fix it.

They forget: ‘I am the captain of my vessel’. 

With every piece figured out: ‘that’s why this is the way it is!’, even with the onset of healing, I’m split wide open all over again with the anxiety of avoiding or repeating the cycle. It is so painful I can barely stand it, and on my worst days, I can barely stand myself. It takes everything I have just to stay present. 

When others distract with things that are potentially triggering, this is an effect that is damaging without them really knowing how much damage they’re potentially unleashing simply by not letting it be or not trusting me to do what I have to do. There is a difference when a situation organically dredges up a triggering aspect. These I can handle. I can regulate through them. It’s the overwhelming overbearing quality of the village trying to raise me and mine that sets off intolerable discomfort. 

I find comfort in knowing that these dynamics are prevalent in small communities. It is grounding to know and understand that the social aspects at play are commonly problematic. Perhaps it’s the bleak truth that others have survived this and worst that keeps me standing my ground and daring to move forward without the chains at my ankles.

It comes down to trust and choice. Having neither, treading water, and finally finding then losing both—it has staggered me. It’s like being at sea and not being allowed to take the helm.

Severing ties became a necessary measure of survival. Rebuilding and maintaining bonds—the same. A person might be able to survive without human connection, but if that were true at its centre, none of us would need anyone; society would crumble, and the human race would cease to exist. 

Isn’t that a cruel irony?

We endure judgement from one another about our dependency and integration yet also about our individuation and isolation.

We are judged on how we treat others, while others seem to treat us any way they choose.

How long was I to go on being deprived of simple acts of kindness from others while being criticised for no longer displaying them? How long are any of us to go on sacrificing what feels natural for the sake of what appears to be just the right amount of everything according to the viewer—the right mix of politeness and firmness, of reserve and freedom, of conformity and independence? 

How much more dependency exists within the watchful gaze of those who violate the boundaries?

Is there not a kind of codependency within the community itself as it assumes a role that should never be theirs, treating humans as pet projects to be fixed and honed to their liking, never agreeing on a perfect blend, mixing and cutting vital elements, and then punishing the vessel of their sour cocktail? 

Isn’t that counterintuitive to the lesson society has attempted to impart? Is it not just a terrible bit of wing-clipping rather than an act of necessity? Isn’t it more about one group of humans trying to assert authority over another? One group trying to assume power and control, utilising superiority or privilege, weaponising it, feeding off not just lack of privilege but basic deficits borne out of trauma and exacerbated by yet more of it, deficits that would otherwise be filled or at least balanced within the right conditions.

These conditions are not an environment taut with conflict, the blame for which is placed upon those within the eye of the storm, at the centre of harassment from those with a top-down position (privilege) without acknowledging the storm itself or the source of it, while the rest of us, especially those who value status, fight amongst ourselves to reach the top of a pyramid none of us should really want to climb if it means stepping on the heads of those who find value elsewhere. Morbid as it is, this is where suicidal ideation occurs—I’d rather be buried beneath the damned pyramid than struggling to climb it at the expense of others like a fool. Those who seek to arrange such things are those who might find themselves at the top with a final view of the carnage. Only then will they see what the rest of us can see from the ground.

There are people cruel enough to join forces with our Shadow, to gather en masse, not in the heat of a moment, by mistake, on impulse, or fleetingly… but intentionally rallying others against us, using our weaknesses to tear us down from the inside… until the bully looks only like ourselves, instead of the real-world behaviour of others who slip unnoticed back into their Shadows, showing only their light, having robbed us of ours.

How will you ever know who I am if you destroy me in the process?

Maybe the point is that you don’t really wish to know me. You only seek to reinforce the idea of me. For better or worse, that’s not really knowing someone. For better or worse, this kind of reinforcement of a theory doesn’t make you right.

Your destruction dictates unnatural change.

When there are so many determined to be proven right, so many committed to a cause, willing to be covertly destructive, inciting change without knowing why someone has changed because of blindness, ANY progressive growth is a bit of a miracle. 

I’ve grown despite the efforts of others to keep me locked in darkness, to keep me chained to despair. I’m breaking free and I began doing it a little too impolitely for most people to tolerate and honestly, that’s what freedom looks like for some of us.

I’m sorry. Yes.

I’m sorry for a lot of things. I’m sorry that I forgot my manners in the middle of a nervous breakdown.

The only other thing breaking down again any time soon will be the barriers separating me from the core of who I am, the false beliefs holding me back from myself, the same untruths and fears others use to keep me tethered to old dynamics. Those old dynamics can go, too.

So, too, can go those twisted lies of others that spin every triumph, every process, every truth until it distorts reality.

But is it really possible to distance myself from those lies when they’ve been planted so deeply? Is it possible that my own roots can strengthen enough to distill those lies to its essence, to really understand and know the destroyer? No matter who they are or how many persist?

I have been trying to survive. It seemed that the only way to do that at one point was to disrespect myself as much as others did. My eventual refusal, my eventual respect for myself and the battle I fought to reach that point, brought with it wrath, from within and from those who preferred old dynamics, entertainment, and power.

The spell is broken. The lie is shattered. The false beliefs are slowly disintegrating.

The process might have been unbecoming because that is exactly what it was. I had to unbecome what others had made of me, what I allowed them to make of me. Slowly, I am becoming myself once more.

You can’t keep cutting me open, expecting me to bleed and heal on your every whim. I will dull your blade. It shouldn’t be assumed that as a female I must absolutely stand down. If I am attacked, I will defend. I will defend.

I will also remember that toxicity is everywhere, even among those who claim to want to remedy it.

Keep your poison. I’m still recovering.

If I am not allowed to truly acknowledge when the blame does NOT fall on me, and only the bits where it does, I would potentially spend the rest of my life weighted with responsibility that isn’t my own, burdening myself with troubles that take up space best used on actionable problems of my own, all while trying to stay resilient against those who shame me for never moving forward.

I’m done with that. These days, those who cross that boundary should recognise: it’s a boundary. (You might be prosecuted.)

When I could muster the strength to rise, to put one foot in front of the other, one word in front of the other, I rebuilt the boundaries, and every day, I fight to keep them upright. I try to stay flexible without letting myself be trampled, without defending the boundaries with vigilance that steals away my attention from the other significant things in life but without those boundaries, I’m vulnerable, in a way that no one should be, and yet so many of us are.

‘Be cool’ should not be synonymous with ‘let me disrespect you’. It often is. 

My eventual intolerance of it sparked outrage. My boundaries slammed many a trespasser. I cried through the transition of that but my boundaries withstood the flood. So many of my boundaries have been crossed. It seems I couldn’t take a single step without stepping on someone’s toes. My advice is this: you’re over the line. Back up or accept it.

I’m still gonna move forward.

 

13 I Am Still Here

 

I write between the spaces, in the quiet recesses, in the solitude amid the chaos, squeezing words between the chatter, seeking clarity and voice that is my own amid the incessant sea of shattered silence.

There comes a point in everyone’s life where they have to admit they’ve been gravely wrong about something they’ve pursued or believed. Mine was this: seeking too much good in people and trusting they held values that would lead them into the good. My mistake cost me my own light. I was abused for so long that it snuffed out my light and for a time all I had to put back into the world was the cruelty I endured. That was my darkest hour. The darkness held me.

My child brought light.

My heart is both lighter and heavier, but not darker. Not anymore. Even though I still have days where everything feels like a burden, I recognise that it wouldn’t have worth if it didn’t have weight.

I’m still within the stage of acknowledging myself. I’m here and present enough. I’m acknowledging that it’s okay to have moments and roles outside of my roles as partner and mother, and it took becoming a mother to remember and recognise that it really is okay to prioritise myself as well.

It’s more important than it’s ever been to keep my focus where it’s needed: not with image, but with improvement. How I am perceived by others is something I resolve to keep outside of my boundary line. Aesthetic means less to me now because it became someone else’s target for a weakness I couldn’t grow from. My body is now healing.

I am healing. 

Like a bonsai, never having the space and freedom to grow naturally makes me feel like my life isn’t my own, as though it isn’t worth living because I’m not allowed to live on my terms, even when those terms are acceptable. This website is the space I’ve chosen as my own. It offers freedom. It feels like a space where I can share an honest expression of who I am, what interests me, and what matters to me. 

The determination required to push past perception and reception is the cost of expression. 

It is liberty laced with dread and bolstered by this truth: that I’m decent and I have a right to exist. That truth is more radical than it should ever be. It should be a universal and tangible truth for all of us but it rarely ever is.

What do I fear? 

I fear losing individuality, I fear being pulled back into shared mentalities that don’t align with who I am at my core.

And what do I grieve most right now? 

Time and love lost. My principles, thrown in a blender after almost giving up, convinced I was wrong, influenced to become less right. 

I grieve the person I became, the pain I caused others in the process. These things were temporary, but the pain doesn’t go away.

Is that true for all of us? 

Only if we acknowledge it, I guess.

This kind of pain is harder to come through. I find it easier to forgive another than I can forgive myself. I take comfort knowing that I still have those principles; beneath it all, they’re intact—as is my sanity—and the love I still have in my life is a stronger, more authentic love that I will be grateful for in whatever time remains.

Throughout my life, when I’ve said ‘I can see the patterns’, I have never been able to articulate exactly what I meant by that; now it’s clear and what was holding me back from speaking my truth is gone. I’m untethered, and the pain society inflicted was the double-edged sword that severed me from the guilt and shame that binds too many of us.

While ‘attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity’ (Simone Weil), I have been over-generous and have since dialled back to preserve my well-being. It’s a matter of self-care. I am selective in who and what I now give my attention to.

I’m still here. 

I have the audacity to exist. I am deflecting your projections and perfecting my perceptions; the space once filled with your perceptions of me is not for rent.

 

 

 

 

Excerpts from this post also previously published on Substack and Medium

Feat. image by Mandy Naleli via Unsplash