Growing up, I wondered if something was fundamentally wrong with me – if I was too emotional, too angry, too unstable, too wrong to exist. I didn’t have the language back then to understand what I was going through, but something always felt off. Like I was carrying weight that wasn’t mine, reacting to things that didn’t make sense on the surface, or shrinking myself to fit into some role that was never meant for me.

Growing up, I often felt invisible – not in the sense that I wasn’t noticed, but that I was only seen in the ways that served someone else’s idea of me. I didn’t feel like I was loved for who I was. It was more about playing the role assigned to me – meeting expectations, getting results, being impressive, talented or compliant. There wasn’t a lack of love or care in the sense of practical needs – there was an absence of nurturing and attunement, of being seen as a human with my own needs. What I thought, felt or wanted didn’t seem to matter unless it matched what was expected of me.

When I resisted, questioned, cried, or simply wanted to do what made sense to me – I was met with outrage, disapproval, control or punishment (verbal and physical). It felt like punishment for having a voice or a mind of my own. I was often treated with hostility and wondered what I did to cause it. The message seemed to be: don’t complain, don’t feel or need too much, be like everyone else, don’t be ungrateful; as if I was wrong to want to be treated kindly or with fairness.

I was often made to question reality – when I remembered an event a certain way, I was told that the opposite had happened, or that they never said what I heard them say. I was told my lived experience was invalid and I “should” feel what I was told to feel. I could sense that the words I heard didn’t match the actions I experienced. Sometimes, the conflicting messages and constant suppression of myself resulted in outbursts, which were only punished and never understood.

At some point, I started to believe the narrative they gave me and the more I tried to ‘fix’ myself, the more broken I felt. I kept wondering what was true while trying to be the high achiever, the people pleaser, the one who doesn’t question too much or cause trouble. I often felt tense, afraid, confused, angry and ashamed – always unsure whether my thoughts or feelings were real, or just signs of some flaw I couldn’t name.

The original fog created in my mind from my early experiences continued to grow in my adulthood. A few relationships which destabilised me made me look for explanations. Why did the people close to me behave this way with me? Why wouldn’t they understand who I was or what I was trying to say? Why did they say the truth was false and the false was truth? Why did they need to place unfair expectations on me, try to control me, or misjudge me? What did I do wrong and what should I have done instead? Why did I explode over things that weren’t a big deal to others? Why did other people get so bothered by things that weren’t a big deal to me? Why did I doubt myself even when I had valid reasons to trust my instincts?

Maybe I always preferred solitude over being with family or friends not because I liked being alone so much, but because it was lonelier in the presence of people who didn’t really see or value me, and didn’t truly care about my well being. Trying to connect with certain people had so often led to being dismissed, criticised, disbelieved, judged or manipulated – or attempts to fit me into the role they assigned me. Maybe that’s why I kept trying to prove my worth in adult relationships, or why I could never quite relax when I was around people.

It wasn’t until I got a lot of distance from those relationships that I started putting pieces together. That my early environment had distorted my reality, and told me that relationships only brought pain instead of understanding. Finding this familiar, in my adulthood I became involved with new people who mirrored those early dynamics.

After failed relations, years of burning anger, and attempts to explain things to those who hurt me but refused to understand, I shut down from those people to finally connect with myself – without anyone’s distortions or control. In this space, I wasn’t “crazy” after all. I wasn’t broken. I wasn’t who they said I was. My instincts were right when I felt like something was off about what those people did. And I started to unlearn the idea that I must earn respect, love or permission to exist.

These realisations didn’t come all at once – they unfolded slowly and painfully, after repeatedly going over events to find answers for why so many things had to happen this way. In the process I learned that many people’s beliefs and motivations can be totally different from mine, and that my ‘craziness’ and ‘flaws’ were trauma responses to my experiences with them. In my own small ways, I started to see the truth beneath the fog, and make sense of all the confusion that was a baseline for most of my life.

And it felt like putting on glasses.