The Grace of Being Misunderstood

There is a particular pain that does not come from being hurt by someone who knows you and chooses cruelty. That pain is real and significant and deserves its own conversation. But the pain I want to talk about tonight is different. It is the pain of being hurt by someone who does not know you at all, who has constructed a version of you in their mind that bears only a partial resemblance to the person you actually are, and who is responding with full conviction and full emotional investment to the version they constructed rather than to the one that is actually standing in front of them. It is the pain of being confidently misread. Of having your motives assigned by people who did not ask what your motives were. Of having your character summarized by people who have access only to a fragment of your story. Of being known by your worst moment or your most visible quality or the role you occupy in someone else's narrative, rather than by the full, complex, contradictory, genuinely human reality of everything you actually are.