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.

We learn early that fitting in is often just a long-form apology for who you are

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

if you're always understood, you're probably not saying much.

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

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. And those are the only interpretations that were ever going to matter anyway.

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.

The philosopher Epictetus

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.