Miss Understood
The thing I have struggled with most, perhaps more than anything else in the world, is being misunderstood.
I've tried, at length, to change this.
First I tried to fit in. When that didn't work, I tried to explain myself to people. When I realised they still didn’t understand, I began to focus on intention. At least, if people understood my intentions, saw me at the level of my soul, and realised I was good, perhaps then, they could finally, in some way, understand.
Inexplicably, even that didn’t work.
Eventually I realised, that trying to be understood, is futile. It is never gonna work. Because people are just not wired, to ever entirely understand each other. It is a fact of humanity, that at a basic level, we are all different, and within that, we cannot fully understand each other. The more different we are, the more unique, the larger the divide in understanding. Even when it comes to our own families, our own children, and even the people we love the most dearly in the whole universe, we will perhaps, never find understanding. We may live out our entire lives, and never be fully understood, by anyone.
A month ago, I realised the absolute truth of this.
And that’s when I decided, it was time to stop trying to be understood, and to instead, dissolve this futile part of myself which kept relentlessly grasping for understanding. I wanted to quit trying to be understood. And instead, simply sit back, and see everything, without the need for it to make sense. Without the need for others either, to make sense, of me.
So I quit talking.
I decided to go into total silence.
It wasn’t an act of hopelessness. It was an act of intention. What I’d realised, was that all this energy I’d spent for 39 years, in trying to be understood, had really only held me back from being more truly myself. And if I wanted to step fully and completely, powerfully, into myself, I needed to let go of being understood. But it felt hard.
I still wanted people to understand.
So I told my friend. The one who I met when she was breastfeeding a squirrel. (Yes, that’s another story for another day).
I wrote my friend a letter, and I told her, that I struggle, with being misunderstood. That I wanted to be ok with people’s misunderstanding, but that I didn’t know how to do it. I knew she would empathise. Squirrel breastfeeders tend to understand being misunderstood.
The squirrel breastfeeder looked at me quizzically. We were sitting together at the coffee shop next to my house while I wrote to her. She knew I'd quit talking. And while most people didn't understand why I’d gone silent, the squirrel lady understood.
“The thing I value most about you”, she said, as we sat outside the coffee shop, “is not your words. It is your essence. And that exists even in silence.”
So we sat there quietly, having our coffees. With our essences. Finally she looked at me.
“Why do you want to be understood?” She asked slowly. “It seems that some part of you, thinks it is good to be understood. It’s as if, part of you thinks that understanding... is good. But... why? Why do you think understanding is important?”
I thought about it for a long time.
I thought about it while I sipped my coffee with my friend. Then I put my coffee down.
I thought about it while I painted my dead aunt floating on the bridge between life and death.
I thought about it while my Son wandered out the front of the house and took a pie out of my bag.
“You carry pies in your bag?” Asked the squirrel lady, glancing up at my son. I shrugged.
I thought about it while my neighbour wandered past and waved at me. “You’re still in silence?” He asked. I nodded. I guess word was getting around. It’s hard to live in a small village with three children, without people starting to notice that you had quit talking. My neighbour pointed at the painting, and gave me a thumbs up. I guess he didn’t realise it was a painting of my dead aunt crossing into the afterlife, with the angel of death.
The squirrel lady began packing up to leave. My son took all the pies out of my bag. I kept sitting outside the coffee shop painting my aunt. The neighbour walked away. And I was left sitting, staring at my aunt, floating on the bridge, guarded by the angel of death. My aunt had died just a week earlier, and I was sitting in the cafe, in silence, trying to paint her way over the bridge. The one that lay between life and death. I was pretty sure nobody would understand that either. And yet, to me, it made sense.
So why did I need to be understood?
I guess, I finally realised, I just wanted people to realise that I was good. That I was sane. That I was always acting from the highest intentions of truth, purpose and integrity, as I saw them. Ultimately, I just wanted people to love and accept me.
And how could I be loved and accepted if nobody understood?
Squirrel lady paid her coffee bill, then came back to hug me. Before she left, she looked at me hard. “You know,” she said, “the silver lining to being misunderstood, is this.” She paused.
“You don’t have to be understood, to be loved.”
I thought about it for a moment, and realised she was 100% right. It was so obvious.
“In fact,” she said slowly, “sometimes the greatest love we will ever find, comes in accepting the people and things that we can’t understand. Sometimes the ones we love the most, are also the ones we understand the least.”
I nodded.
The truth was this. The deeper I went… in life, in love, in everything, the less anyone would ever understood. Anything. But the deeper I went, the more I loved and accepted everything around me. The less I was understood, the more I was able to understand.
I didn’t need to understand other people anymore, in order to accept them.
But would others offer the same back?
I wasn’t sure.
I picked up the notepad on the table, and began to write.
“The more fully I become myself,” I wrote, “the more I am misunderstood by the world.”
I showed the squirrel lady, and she nodded.
I paused, and picked up the pen again.
“The more misunderstood I am,” I continued, “the more alone I am.” Suddenly I wanted to cry. But I kept writing. I felt very alone in that moment.
“If I am misunderstood by everyone,” I wrote again, “I will become a social outcast. I will be so very, very, alone.”
Then I put the pen down, and slid the paper over to my friend.
The squirrel breastfeeder looked at the paper, then looked up at me. Hard. We stared at each other for a long time.
“Yes.” She eventually said.
”Pretty much.”
And then, we sat there together. In silence. We both knew what it meant to be outcasts, to be women alone in the world, alone in ourselves, alone in being misunderstood, and in this, there was at least some understanding.
“You may never be understood” the squirrel lady finally sighed.
”Some of us, are impossible to understand”.
She hesitated, and continued gently, “But you will always be loved.”
A single tear slid down my cheek and I nodded, and grasped her hand.
Deep down, I knew that she was right.
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Photography by H.A.Gold
www.500px.com/hagold