355. misunderstanding

I am not what I am. I am what you mistake me for.

This is an unsettling observation. It suggests that who you are to someone else isn’t determined by your intentions, your character, or even your actions, but by the meaning they assign to those things. Not because that meaning is accurate, but because it becomes the only version of you they ever interact with.

And once that meaning settles, it can override reality entirely. You can show up consistently. You can treat someone well. You can be present, careful, even loving. And still be misunderstood in a way that doesn’t correct itself. Not because your actions weren’t seen, but because they weren’t believed. Perception, once fixed, can matter more than evidence.

People don’t meet each other as blank slates. They meet through filters. Through expectations shaped by past relationships, unexamined beliefs, old wounds, and familiar patterns. What they see isn’t you as you are, but you as you make sense within a framework they were already carrying. You aren’t encountered as a whole person. You’re encountered as an interpretation.

And that interpretation is rarely neutral.

Most of the time, it’s assembled quietly, without confrontation or malice. A tone is read a certain way. A hesitation is given meaning. A silence is filled in. Even actions that should clarify things don’t necessarily correct the picture as they don’t always add understanding. They just get absorbed into the existing story instead. These interpretations don’t arise because someone is cruel or careless. They arise because the mind prefers coherence over uncertainty. It prefers explanation over ambiguity, so it fills the gaps.

The danger isn’t necessarily that people do this. The danger is what happens once an interpretation forms. It often stops being provisional. It hardens into certainty. And at that point, new information is no longer processed as information. It arrives as disruption. As something that threatens the internal rationale holding the story together.

This leads into another realization that’s harder to ignore once you see it: when someone misunderstands you, the misunderstanding is rarely random. It has structure. It follows a pattern. It reflects what that person is primed to notice, what they’re braced for, what they expect to find.

Someone who expects rejection finds distance everywhere. Someone who expects control hears demand where there is confusion. Someone who expects harm keeps listening for it, even in neutral moments. The misreading isn’t just about you. It reveals the lens through which you’re being seen.

In that way, misunderstanding becomes diagnostic. Not because the person intends to reveal themselves, but because distortion always leaks information about the system producing it. What someone consistently misreads tells you what they fear, what they assume, and what they’re trying to protect.

This is why misinterpretations are often defended so fiercely. Correcting them isn’t simply a matter of updating a detail. It challenges the internal narrative that made the misinterpretation feel true in the first place. It risks exposing insecurity, bias, or a decision that was justified using incomplete information. For many people, revising the story costs more than maintaining it. Certainty, even false certainty, can feel safer than reopening the question.

Once that threshold is crossed, something subtle but important changes. You stop being treated as a person and start being treated as a position. As a symbol. As a projection. Your actions are no longer evaluated on their own terms. They’re filtered through a narrative that has already been decided.

At that point, dialogue becomes dangerous. Clarification threatens coherence. Conversation introduces the possibility that the story might not hold. Silence becomes attractive because it preserves the interpretation. Therefore, the story remains intact. And with it, the self-image that depends on that story.

This is why misunderstandings are often not resolved, but abandoned. It’s often easier to start over than to confront the internal beliefs that pushed someone away in the first place.

There’s an irony here that’s easy to miss. In these moments, the person being misunderstood is often blamed for not being clearer, not being louder, not correcting the record sooner. But that assumes there was space for correction in the first place. It assumes curiosity was still alive. Often, it wasn’t. The conclusion had already been reached.

When that happens, you’re no longer responding to who you are. You’re responding to who someone needs you to be in order for their internal story to make sense.

That’s what makes misunderstanding more dangerous than rejection. Rejection responds to something real, even if it hurts. Misunderstanding replaces the real person with a construction that can be dismissed, justified against, or walked away from without ever being examined.

People can never understand us perfectly. But the ways they misunderstand us are not meaningless. They point somewhere. Not toward who we are, but toward what they bring with them when they look.

And once curiosity gives way to certainty, things don’t usually fall apart loudly. They go wrong quietly. Often in ways no one thinks to revisit.