Sometimes, there’s a kind of silence that follows you after a reaction… a silence not of peace, but of judgment. It’s the silence where some people make a quiet decision: that you are the problem, you are unreasonable, you are difficult. And once that image is locked in, everything you say or do is filtered through it.

Some people in my life seemed to view me with such a lens. Angry or emotional reactions I had to their behaviour were automatically considered “wrong” or viewed without context. I don’t deny that my reactions often got explosive due to build-up over long periods, and I continue working on managing their intensity. But I don’t believe the intensity itself should become a reason for erasing the cause behind the reaction.

But they only seemed shocked when I reacted. It was usually hard for me to identify the exact name for the behaviours, but over time I could recognise things like them invalidating my experiences or boundaries, trying to control or manipulate me, shaming who I was, or reframing real incidents into another version that felt unrecognisable. And when these actions caused me to have reactions, I was told that my feelings were baseless, my hurt was invalid, and the impact of their actions simply didn’t matter. They erased the context of my reactions and what led up to it, as if my response came out of nowhere and confirmed that something was wrong with me.

But I had already wondered all my life if something was wrong with me. It’s not surprising then, that in the face of such judgments, I repeatedly went over every incident, questioning the validity of my feelings – trying to find out if the way I felt was really as unreasonable as they said. After a long time of going over things from several angles, after questioning my own actions and comparing it to theirs, after reading materials on relational dynamics – in the end, I found that I did have real reasons to feel the way I did after all. It was just that they didn’t seem to think so.

I thought the reason why they didn’t acknowledge it was that there had been some ‘misunderstanding’. In a way, that gave me hope, because if it was just that they weren’t aware of their actions, or they had misunderstood my response to them – then surely, I thought, I could explain. That if I could just show them the cause-and-effect of events, they would finally come to see that my feelings were valid. That I was willing to work on my expression of those feelings, but also hoped that we could connect without hurting each other.

What I didn’t know was that this would become a trap. Each time I tried to explain what I was feeling or why something hurt, I was met with complete refusal. They either disengaged, or shifted the blame onto me, or turned it into an argument, or said there was no point in talking about it.

The more this happened, the more I began to over-explain, starting to feel as if I needed to build a complete case for it to finally get through. I started going into timelines, even walking through events step by step, trying to say: This is why I said that. This is why I felt that way. I kept thinking that if I could just convey everything clearly enough, they may finally see my attempts and meet me halfway, and this may be how we could resolve things.

Every time, I hoped: maybe now they’ll get it, maybe now it’ll stop. But the more carefully I explained, the more shocking the response became – as if my clarity somehow made things worse. As if the message was: “Your feelings, your experience, your struggle, your explanation — none of it matters. You’re still wrong.”

It deeply confused me.

They never felt the need to explain why they behaved in hurtful ways or why they judged my reactions; they just did. They never saw any reason to engage with what I said in good faith. Their judgments were final, and their behaviour would never change, no matter what I said. It started to seem like they refused to listen, not because that was the only option, but so that they could maintain the story they created about me… a story where they were always right and I was the problem.

I guess it finally shattered my illusion that these were all just misunderstandings. They just never wanted to understand. They never wanted to question or change how they treated me or how their actions affected my life. They weren’t people who were just missing some context; they were people interested in preserving their own version of the story, not in building a bridge.

And I guess I no longer care what their version says anymore.