000017 — Let It Be. Misunderstood

Being misunderstood is often the cost of being yourself out loud, especially when the way you think doesn’t look like everyone else.

I can trace my awareness of this back to late elementary school, and I can see it clearly in fourth grade. I had a teacher who would get visibly frustrated when it looked like I wasn’t paying attention. I’d stare off into nothingness, daydream, look out the window, not take notes, and she would call it out like a character flaw. “Darryl, pay attention. You’re not listening.” The part that messed with me is I was listening. I could be fully present and understand exactly what she was saying while also watching birds play in the field across the street. My grades were never the issue. They weren’t just fine, they were good. And still, she carried this suspicion that I was cheating, because I didn’t look like the other kids while I was learning.

Moments like that, and there were many, didn’t simply frustrate me. It shaped my relationship with adults. I stopped experiencing authority as nurture and protection and guidance, and I started experiencing it as threat. People who took no time to understand me were trying to shape and define me, and I didn’t have language for what was happening, so I internalized it. I felt like the bad kid. I felt small. I felt trapped inside a world where I was alone in my own head, and the people who were supposed to help were the ones accusing me.

That’s a long echo for one classroom.

And it’s why, even now, misunderstanding hits me deeper than it should. I used to see this only as a communication problem, when in reality it’s a nervous system memory. When I feel misunderstood, my first move isn’t to clarify. My first move is to shrink. I isolate. I go internal, to the place where I know I’m safe. And then, if I do re-emerge, I tend to perform. I overexplain. I tighten. I retreat again.

The tricky part is I still have to discern what kind of misunderstanding I’m in.

Sometimes you’re misunderstood because you’re unclear. Sometimes you’re misunderstood because you’re early. Sometimes you’re misunderstood because you’re speaking from a part of yourself that doesn’t yet have mature language. And sometimes you’re misunderstood because people do not have a category for how you operate, so they label you based on what they can recognize.

Discernment is knowing which one you’re in, and not treating every misunderstanding like an emergency.

When I was younger, I tried to solve misunderstanding with words. It didn’t work. Or at least it didn’t work for me. So I learned a different strategy. I would show with actions. I would prove. I would make myself so consistent, so reliable, so excellent that nobody could question me. That strategy paid off in some ways, and it also built a quiet trap. If your answer to being misunderstood is perfection, you end up living in a posture of performance. You’re not creating from freedom, you’re creating to be believed.

This is where I mean it literally: let it be, let it sit.

A lot of original work is just identity expressed in public. It’s not a call to be stubborn, and it’s not a romantic story about being the lone genius. It’s a practice of holding tension without immediately reaching for relief. It’s the willingness to let an idea take the time it needs to become clear, and to let people take the time they need to catch up, while you keep your integrity intact.

Clarify when love requires it, when the relationship matters, when the stakes are real. But I am learning not to clarify only because my body is panicking. I can feel that urge in my jaw, the old need to win the room back before the room has even decided what it thinks. If I sand down the edge of what I meant just so it can be received quickly, I do not end up understood. I end up diluted.

Being misunderstood is sometimes feedback, and sometimes it’s just friction, and sometimes it’s the cost of being different. The work is to pause long enough to tell the difference, and for me that pause is the work.

Let the heat pass before I start performing. Let the sentence sit before I overexplain. Let the room misread me without immediately trying to win it back. Fourth grade me didn’t have language for any of that, he just learned to go quiet and prove himself later. I’m still unlearning it. I’m still learning how to stay in the room while my eyes go to the window, and to trust that I’m here even when it doesn’t look like it.