You cannot explain yourself into being understood
You’ve rewritten the explanation forty times.
They still don’t get it. And here’s the thing I most want you to hear: they can’t. Not won’t. Can’t.
I spent years — the worst years of my life, frankly — trying to explain myself to people who didn’t want to know. Trying to find the words that would make them see. If I put it like this, they’ll understand. If I explain the history, the reasons, what it’s been like inside — then they’ll treat me differently. Then they’ll be kind. I went in with the perfect version, again and again, and came out each time with a new draft.
It never worked. And it never worked for a reason I couldn’t see while I was in it.
Everyone is somewhere different on their own road. Different level of understanding, different amount of self-knowledge, different distance travelled. Not better or worse — different. And you cannot hand someone an understanding they haven’t arrived at, any more than I can explain to my four-month-old why bedtime matters, or to my seven-year-old what I understand at forty. It isn’t a lack of love. We’re just not in the same place.
Some of us have been forced a long way down that road by hardship. Suffering does that — it accelerates understanding, whether you wanted it to or not. And when you’ve been pushed that far, it’s genuinely hard to remember that the people around you haven’t been. So you keep explaining, and they keep not getting it, and you take it personally, when it was never personal. They’re just where they are.
Here’s the other half, and it’s the one that finally set me down.
It’s not your job.
You are not responsible for other people’s understanding. Not for their picture of you, not for whether they get it, not for whether they think you’re kind or cold or difficult. It’s okay for someone to misunderstand you. It’s okay for someone to think what’s wrong with him because you set a boundary they never saw the reason for. Their impression of you is theirs — built from their own stuff, their own fears, their own place on the road — and you can’t manage it, and you don’t have to.
That felt like giving up when I first heard it. It isn’t. It’s the moment you stop begging. Because that’s what the forty drafts were: begging to be seen by people who couldn’t see. And begging keeps you small, and stuck, and standing in front of the same door.
What replaces it is simpler and quieter. You say the thing once, plainly. This doesn’t work for me. I’m not able to do that. No history, no essay, no forty-first version. And then you let them think what they think, and you get on with your life, and the people who can understand will, in their own time, and the people who can’t will be exactly where they were regardless.
If you’ve been explaining yourself for years and wondering why it never lands, you’re not bad at explaining. You’ve been trying to do something that can’t be done, to people who weren’t in a position to receive it. It’s not your fault. But you can put the drafts down now.
Every Tuesday I run a live guided session online. Ten minutes of coming back to your own body — the one place you don’t have to explain anything. Come and try a session, and see how it feels to stop.
— Adam