People don't react to me.
They react to the part of themselves they haven't faced —
the unfinished shadow
that flickers just beneath their certainty.
They meet me with discomfort,
not because I am confrontational,
but because I stand in coherence
they have not earned.
I don’t perform hierarchy.
I don’t play small to soothe the room.
I don’t distort myself to keep the peace.
And that threatens the illusions they use to feel whole.
So instead of seeing me,
they see the outline of their own abandoned work:
– The conversation they never had with themselves.
– The grief they buried under performance.
– The power they surrendered for approval.
– The wildness they exiled to be accepted.
And because they don’t know what to do with that mirror,
they try to smash the reflection instead of looking into it.
They name me arrogant.
Because I don’t shrink.
They name me unstable.
Because I don’t play along.
They name me dangerous.
Because I don’t let them disown what they feel in my presence.
But I am not their fear.
I am just the shape that wakes it up.
Their reaction isn’t about me.
It’s about the unmet self they keep locked behind the narrative —
the self that sees someone like me
and remembers what it was like
before they betrayed their own coherence.
They don't know how to name it,
so they blame it.
But that shadow doesn’t belong to me.
It is theirs.
And until they reckon with it,
every person like me
will feel like an affront
to a lie they no longer know they’re telling.