Why I Didn’t Say It

The year I was eight, I could name over 300 dog breeds without help. I knew the Azawakh carried its ribs high and tight. That a Norwegian Lundehund had six toes and could close its ears shut. I could explain the difference between a Barbet and a Lagotto Romagnolo, and knew the Komondor’s cords didn’t naturally form without intervention. I memorized bite alignment, coat types, prey drives. I knew which breeds were recognized by the FCI but not the AKC. I liked how classification made sense on paper, even when nothing else did.

I moved through the world that way. Looking for categories. Not because I needed things to stay the same, but because I needed a way to name what I saw. I learned early that precision could be a form of comfort. That if I named something accurately enough, it might make sense. I catalogued behaviors the same way I catalogued breeds. Temperament. Tone. Tendencies. I noticed when words didn’t match expressions. When kindness came too fast to be real. When people broke pattern. I tracked shifts in tone like they were training cues. Raised voice, dropped eye contact, too much enthusiasm in the wrong moment. I noticed who interrupted. Who changed the subject when it got too quiet. I made mental lists, adjusted behavior accordingly. It looked like social intelligence. It was actually surveillance. A way to stay ahead of disappointment. A way to stay safe.

I didn’t always get it right, but I got close enough to pass. Close enough to avoid being corrected. It wasn’t instinct. It was repetition. I didn’t always understand the rules, but I could follow them closely. I noticed the words that lingered and the ones that left silence behind. Mimic the contours of a reaction. Match the tone. Memorize the expected response. It was never natural, just learned. Like reciting a language I wasn’t fluent in. Delay. Redirect. Absorb. Don’t ask for clarity. Don’t repeat yourself. Don’t show confusion. The goal was neutrality. If I couldn’t belong, I could at least pass through unnoticed. I used to study people so I could move among them. Now I watch from the edge. I no longer want to blend. I don’t want to be invited in. Grief changed that. It rewired my tolerance. It made certain conversations uninhabitable. I spent years learning how to understand other people. How to anticipate. How to respond. And it still surprises me how few return the effort. Most simply wait for you to adjust. To flatten. To become manageable. I no longer perform that. I would rather be misunderstood than misrepresented. There are things I still don’t say out loud. Not because I’m afraid, but because I know what happens when I do. There’s a look people give you when you say something too raw. Too unsanitized. They mistake the truth for hostility. The discomfort is yours to manage.

I’m not like you. That’s not a criticism. It’s just a fact. My silence is not absence. My quiet is not detachment. I have feelings. They just don’t perform well in public. They take up space in slower ways. I’m trying to understand. I can’t read between the lines. This feels loud to me. That joke didn’t land. I don’t know how to respond. I’m still thinking. Please don’t take my silence personally. I wasn’t taught how to say it that way. I’m paying attention, just not the way you want me to. It’s not that I don’t feel. It’s that I feel too much at once. I’m not withholding. I’m processing. I’m exhausted from explaining. I didn’t mean to make it awkward. I only know how to be honest. I wish that were enough. Just because you don’t understand me doesn’t mean I need to be fixed. I don’t need translation. I need respect. I need people to stop measuring me by how familiar I feel to them. Some of us live differently inside our lives. That doesn’t make it less real. It just makes it harder to explain without losing something in the process.

Psychology says people overestimate their self-awareness. That most believe they’re good at reading others, even when they miss the obvious. Empathy gets confused with projection. Intention gets mistaken for impact. I think about that often. How many people say they value honesty but punish you when you offer it. How discomfort is framed as confrontation. How clarity becomes a threat. It’s strange, the way people expect understanding from you they wouldn’t extend in return. They want softness from others, but not enough to soften themselves. It’s easier to misread someone than to question what you assumed about them in the first place.

Somewhere between entropy and equilibrium, the body keeps moving. Systems decay, but they don’t fail all at once. Memory loses fidelity. Heat dissipates. The second law of thermodynamics says everything tends toward disorder, but slowly and predictably. We don’t unravel in chaos, but in sequence. Even grief has a half-life. It doesn’t disappear. It just changes state. Like signal, like matter, like anything that ever meant something and didn’t know where to go next. The brain can’t hold infinite energy. Cortisol accumulates under chronic stress the way heat builds in a closed system. It’s not the spike that does the damage. It’s the steady rise. The constant alertness. The internal rerouting. Eventually the body adapts by shutting certain things down. Not out of weakness, but preservation. You feel it in memory, in speech, in the way your voice gives out when you’re trying to explain it again. The system isn’t failing. It’s conserving. This is how people disappear without leaving.