For most of my life, I’ve carried this deep impulse to explain myself.
To be precise.
Clear.
Impossible to misunderstand.

I always assumed this was a personality quirk — something built into me.
Only now, at thirty-five, am I realising it was never a quirk at all.

It was survival.

Because the one person who should have seen me — my mother — spent my entire childhood twisting conversations, reframing reality, feigning confusion, and stepping around the truth whenever it suited her. And so I grew up trying to speak in ways she couldn’t distort. But she still did.

She didn’t misunderstand me.

She refused to see me.

This landed only in the past day, during the most ordinary moment: eating a lamb curry while checking emails. She had replied to a message I’d sent — a simple, clear message about finances and therapy — and she responded with guilt, money, confusion, and emotional accounting. The same tools she’s always used.

But something inside me was different this time.

I didn’t feel the old collapse.
I didn’t feel the need to justify or clarify.
I didn’t feel the urge to be understood.

I felt done.

Not done with her existence.
Done with the dynamic.

Done explaining myself to anyone who benefits from misunderstanding me.
Done being pulled into emotional loops I’ve already lived through a thousand times.
Done shrinking into a version of myself that doesn’t exist anymore.

I went for a walk after that.
Took the dog.
Headed toward water, because something in my body needed space — a horizon, a place to let the charge move.

And as I walked, it struck me:

It wasn’t that she didn’t see me.
It was that she didn’t want to.

For a child, that’s unbearable.
For an adult, it’s clarifying.

Everything makes sense now — the way I always tried to say things perfectly, the way I feared being misunderstood, the way I kept hoping one day she’d finally hear me clearly, the way I twisted myself into transparency.

Of course I did.
I grew up with someone who benefited from pretending not to understand.

Learning that is painful.
But it’s also freeing.

Tonight I realised something else:
I don’t need to explain myself to neighbours, tutors, family members, or anyone else.
Not because I’m closed off — but because I’m finally rooted enough not to hand over my reality for someone else to interpret.

I am no longer the child who needed permission to exist.

I am the adult who owns his voice, his boundaries, his financial life, his choices, and his experience.

And for the first time, when I speak,
it feels like me.

Not the child trying to be heard.
Not the teenager trying to prove his reality.
Not the adult trying to stay ahead of someone else’s distortions.

Just me.
A grounded man who is finally waking up inside his own life.

The spell is broken.

And now I walk forward without explaining a single step.