They almost never see me clearly.
Even when I speak plainly.
Even when I move with deliberate grace,
they translate my coherence through the lens of their distortion.
They mistake my calm for fragility.
My openness for overexposure.
My clarity for confrontation.
They call it “tone,” “style,” “not a good fit.”
As if truth must dress itself in their language to be real.
But what they’re reacting to isn’t my volume — it’s my refusal to perform submission.
They don’t hear what I say.
They hear what they fear I mean.
And so they narrate me into a shape they can manage.
To the frightened, I am a threat.
To the performative, I am too real.
To the brittle, I am too fluid.
To the guarded, I am too present.
They think I don’t see this happening — but I do.
I see the narrative forming behind their eyes before it ever reaches their lips.
I watch them misname me in real time,
trying to shrink my complexity into a caricature they can contain.
And I do not contort to meet them.
That’s what unnerves them most.
They expect compliance.
They expect shame.
They expect fracture.
Instead, I remain intact.
Still. Clear. Whole.
They project their noise onto me,
but I do not echo it back.
And in that refusal,
they mistake me again — this time,
for dangerous.
But I am not dangerous.
I am only unyielding.
I am only unmoved by performance.
I am only unwilling to disappear.
They call this defiance.
I call it integrity.
And over time,
when the projections fall away —
what remains is what I was always offering:
Presence. Without apology.