Growth&Grinds

Today I’ve been thinking a lot about why we feel the need to consciously label people.

I know with navigating my own losses, this has been something I keep finding poking around at the way I communicate with others.

For most of my life, I have heard varying stances on my facial expressions.
Mostly my eyes.
From looking fragile, as if one person says something that could break me,
to looking concerned,
or angry.
I’ve heard my eyes have a disarming effect, as if someone feels a sense of ease and familiarity.

But the one that has stood with me lately is the simplest one…. I look sad.

Not tired, not depressed, or stressed. Not something brought to light and validating the turbulent and confusing thoughts. Just sad.

From someone I was sharing the night with, as I was putting my clothes back on.

“You look sad.”

And I wasn’t, honestly. Not in that moment. I was just hyper focused on the task at hand.

It sent me on a downward spiral for a while about depth. And what that word exactly means.

Is it something that we are able to identify through expressions on someone’s face, the energy we feel inside of a dynamic, or something differently entirely?

And sometimes, I think that we use ordinary words to fill a void for something extraordinary.

I thought “yeah, maybe they might be projecting a bit.”
I could sense something off behind the curtain, based off of pattern recognition and social media presence, but there in that moment we were just two human beings reading the energy underneath a contractual agreement.

We had worked at creating a situationship bubble. We knew the arrangement and the parameters set. We both were unable for something meaningful, for whatever reason, yet we were still extracting basic comfort out of this bubble. But, I couldn’t shake the feeling of them trying to read the energy of my soul, just as I was trying to make sense of theirs when they called me out.

Why would you ask me that if you have no intentions of pursuing something here?
Except they didn’t ask, they stated.
I interpreted it as a question.

Outside of that cozy bubble, further interactions with other people in my life and the workforce seemingly proved my theory right. When we don’t have the language to describe something outside of the parameters we are used to, we reach for the next comfortable thing to make sense of it.

A box, if you will.

My experiences have made it incredibly hard for me to sit still in spaces that try to shrink my depth and perception, my new way of thinking. Because it doesn’t fit a traditional mold of what many of us are used to.

“I’m sorry you’re so jaded” I heard as I explained my reasoning for rejection.

Jaded. A very corrosive word, and something that I didn’t personally agree with. I have been jaded before, I know exactly what this feels like, I’ve also witnessed it on others.

It’s just a bit challenging for me to look at someone in the face when I hear them take advantage of the familiarity they have. The comfort of having a loving partner, a roof over their head, and three little girls that look up to them—it evokes a sense of flight in me.

At first glance, this looks an awful lot like jealousy. And I wrestled for a long time with the fact that I may be jealous of something I didn’t have and something that was ripped away from me.

You haven’t experienced the same thing I did, so you can’t logically say that I am jaded. But ultimately, that was their perception of the information they had available. The language they had available, and their understanding of the world around them. Some people become so wounded in life, they become hyper fixated on escape without ever truly experiencing the destruction they are causing for others in the process. And I can’t logically be mad at them for having what they had to describe an experience they didn’t quite understand.

You know?

I heard every excuse in the book. And I am calling them excuses right now, because when someone rejects something from you and your initial reaction is to change the narrative in an attempt to seemingly create forced intimacy, instead of looking at your own reflection and why you feel the need to do this – it no longer becomes a point of connection and starts bleeding into manipulation and abuse of power. “My partner cheated, it’s complicated. My parents abused me. I have deep wounds” even my tattoos were called in an attempt to create a fast bond.

But it was hard for me because while someone was attempting to “get to know me” – I guess, I wonder if I did feel a sense of jaded.

But jaded didn’t quite line up to what I was actually feeling.

I felt exploited.
Unsafe.
Not understood.
Dismissed as a human being.

In the year prior, I had revealed to my boss of the significantly turbulent time I was going through. Homeless, navigating a difficult break up, death and no support system. There was also an incident years prior involving sexual harassment where I chose not to say anything until it started coming back full circle. This information was promised wouldn’t be shared with anyone else, and flash forward to a new boss, someone who had direct power over me told me it was revealed to him.

I couldn’t help but feel preyed upon. I knew in that moment, I was no longer safe there.

“I know you won’t tell anyone else about this.”

“I’ll take you in there right now, and fuck you.”

“I’m not scared for me, I’m scared for YOU”

How is someone supposed to feel hearing things like that?

Somehow, I still feel a bit slighted—because I see both sides of the coin. I see the gap in experiential understanding, and I see the impact of what a label makes me feel. My understanding is they allegedly weren’t aware of how their actions and words may come across. Or even worse, they did, and they exploited the vulnerability and weaponized the “I didn’t know” excuse precisely because my actions up to this point led to someone who just wasn’t sure. Somebody, who didn’t want to get anyone in trouble, and somebody who was afraid to stir the pot. Somebody who has already had to come forth and have the uncomfortable conversation – and what does that make me look like?

The thought of the people that I look up to, are the very ones conspiring and plotting against me ‘yeah, this one is damaged goods. She’s probably all messed up emotionally and would give in easily if I apply the right amount of pressure’ I worried this was the thought in their heads as they smiled in my face every morning.

I wasn’t just jaded, I was protective of my self and my boundaries. I challenged every term thrown at me while they tried to suss out any other excuse for the rejection pinning it on other people’s betrayal of my trust, to childhood wounds – and even though I felt extremely confrontational, it came naturally to me.

My experiences before this weakened my defenses enough so that I could sharpen my perception for predatory behavior, and I wasn’t going to lay down and accept it.

Still, these are usually the hardest parts for me to reconcile.

It’s very easy from most outside perspectives to see and to say “Ashley, what happened to you is wrong. No one deserves to have to go through that.” And that is true, no one ever does deserve to go through that.

But I don’t care about the binary right or wrong any more.

What I care about is how do I reconcile the complexity of understanding multiple sides without forcing my self to adopt a narrative that does not align with my lived in truth?

We do not owe the world to shrink ourselves into the boxes they build for us.

Understanding why someone holds a smaller, ill intentioned, or simply opposing perspective does not condemn you to live inside that box solely.

Empathy without boundaries becomes self condemnation.