I do not seem naturally wired to preserve “harmony” by pretending not to see what I see and not feel what I feel.

It is not as if everyone is having roughly the same experience and others make the more agreeable decision to go with the flow while I make the objectionable decision to diverge, which gets me branded not as divergent but deviant. Difficult to govern gets conflated with untrustworthy and unworthy. Not a team player.

I simply cannot go with a flow that feels wildly dysregulating.

My nervous system picks up and responds to things that either do not hit other people’s radar at all or do not register with anything close to the same intensity. It is not unlike some version of a dog whistle. We can be in the same room, inside the same system, and not be receiving the same input or impact from it.

If something barely bothers a person, accommodating it will require little of them—nothing to resist or mask. They can easily carry on, genuinely unaffected.

If the same thing is creating unmanageable discomfort in me, going along can leave me completely taxed. My depletion gets read as attitude.

And yet the person who can comfortably accommodate is regarded as flexible and cooperative—which may not be untrue. But the converse about me is not necessarily true.

Yes, I am less easy.

But I don’t think less easy is the same as difficult or deviant.

So how much of what I have understood as something wrong with me was actually the branding of a person who could not seamlessly abide without a trace a visible strain?