For most of my life, I could see the individual friction points but not the structure they shared.

I experienced them as isolated interactions. A misunderstanding. A rupture. A person who was displeased with me (and seemingly intent on making me pay). A relationship I had somehow failed to navigate correctly.

I explained. Apologized. Twisted myself. Worked harder. Questioned myself. Tried another approach (but still, tragically, as myself).

There was the conviction that if I could just understand what I was missing, I could make myself fit. My life energy was wastefully consumed trying to navigate first my family of origin, then people and patterns that mimicked the dynamic where I was expected to want, feel, and need what I did not– and also agree to matter less.

I realize nobody got handed the rules. For mainstream, untraumatized, neurotypical people, it seems to make sense and work.

Expressing any version of no or ouch or confusion consistently resulted in friction. This was baffling to me, honestly. I seriously expected support or comfort, or maybe even some genuine interest.

Now, after nearly six decades of swinging and missing by miles, I have begun to recognize patterns. Systems. Dynamics. Power imbalance. Coercion. All of it.

I see now how easily familiarity masqueraded as normalcy. If a relational structure has been encoded deeply enough, it does not necessarily feel like a structure. It can simply feel like the way things, people, and relationships are—like water to a fish, not something experienced as a condition or even a variable, but simply the world as it is.

And when the majority can function comfortably inside it, a person who cannot is what—a traitor, deviant, pariah?

The person who does not go with THE FLOW is THE problem.

Gosh—-That boxing-with-ghosts fucking energy- it was pure mind fuckery.

I kept approaching each interaction as though there must be a successful response available to me. As though enough insight, enough humility, enough explanation, enough effort would eventually make the thing workable.

It didn’t.

What I am now able to do is name my experience of it. Take something that has remained amorphous and make it legible. Healing has helped me recognize systems that are damaging to me rather than FOR me. I can choose more carefully where I participate, what I adapt to, and what I no longer agree to organize myself around.

Putting it into language demystifies it. Ideally, not only for me, but for anyone who relates to a structure that has previously defied articulation and resulted in a despairing feeling of terminal uniqueness.

Like a shared truth. Are you also learning to recognize the systems and people who are for you—and those who are not?