What happens when the gap you feel is the gap you are maintaining
# They Were Trying to Translate Me
She kept waiting for her family to see her.
Years went by like that. Every conversation felt like speaking through a wall. She would say something true and watch it land wrong. They would nod and change the subject. She started keeping certain things to herself. The gap widened.
She told herself they didn’t understand her. That became the story she lived in.
Then one day she realized something harder. They were trying. They had always been trying. The problem was she kept showing them an older version of herself and expecting them to recognize the person she was becoming.
We ask people to know us but we don’t always tell them who we are now.
We hold onto old grievances like they are proof. We rehearse the ways they failed to see us years ago. We forget we have changed. We forget they might be willing to meet us where we actually are if we stopped testing them against who they were back then.
The gap we feel might not be their refusal. It might be our own silence about who we have become.
There is something we do when we feel unseen. We perform the hurt. We show up already braced for disappointment. We communicate in code and get frustrated when no one cracks it.
The hardest part is not that they don’t understand. The hardest part is admitting we might not have given them much to work with. We changed and we expected them to notice without us saying anything. We became someone new and got angry when they kept treating us like the person we used to be.
Maybe the gap is not about their failure to see us. Maybe it is about our fear of being seen as we actually are now.
What if the distance we feel is the distance we are maintaining?
The thing about family is they knew you before you knew yourself. That can feel like a trap. They remember the version of you that needed their protection or approval or correction. They have a whole archive of who you were and sometimes they reach for those old files without thinking.
But people can update what they know if you give them something new to hold. Not a performance. Not a defence. Just the plain truth of who you are becoming said out loud in a way they can actually hear.
The work is not making them understand you. The work is being willing to be misunderstood while you keep showing up as yourself anyway. No code. No test. Just the ongoing practice of saying the true thing and letting them catch up in their own time.
Sit with these:
– Is there someone you are waiting to see you while withholding the information that would help them do it?
– What version of yourself are you still performing out of old habit?
– What would it feel like to stop testing people against old versions of themselves and meet them where they are now?