Because when you stop translating your truth for other people's comfort, you don't become harder to understand. You become impossible to misinterpret by anyone who was actually listening.

Rothko didn't paint for people who wanted realistic landscapes. Coltrane didn't compose for ears that preferred simple melodies. They created from their center outward, trusting that specificity would find its own resonance. The result wasn't exclusion but precision—work that spoke directly to the people capable of receiving it.

The philosopher Epictetus

depth creates its own magnetism.

Social media platforms optimize for engagement, not understanding, rewarding content that can be rapidly processed rather than ideas requiring contemplation. We're training ourselves to think in ways that maximize immediate comprehension rather than long-term insight.

When you stop translating, extraordinary things happen. Your creative, social, and intellectual bandwidth expands dramatically. The cognitive load of constant performance was enormous—every conversation where you were editing rather than expressing depleted resources that could be directed toward creation, insight, genuine connection.

You can't be legible to everyone without erasing yourself to someone, and usually that someone is you.

Some people misunderstand you because they have to—it protects their narrative about who you are, who they are, how the world works. Your complexity threatens their simplicity, and you finally understand that this is not your problem to solve.

The person who needs everyone to understand them is fundamentally different from the person who has learned to trust their own understanding.