Let them be wrong about you

by mahershalalhashbaz         © techtarget 

You have nothing to prove, it has never been your burden to make them understand.

Let them be wrong about you.

Let them hold onto their versions of you — their crooked stories, their clipped perceptions, their blurred snapshots of who you were on a day you barely made it out of bed.

Let them talk, let them laugh, let them assume.

You are not here to correct every rumor or reintroduce yourself to every person who never tried to know you in the first place.

There is peace in not defending yourself. A kind of stillness in letting the noise pass over you like wind brushing against your skin — present, but powerless. You are not required to turn yourself inside out just to prove that your heart beats gently, that your silence is not arrogance, that your distance is not disdain. You do not owe the world a version of yourself it finds easier to digest.

You are not a résumé. You are not a performance. You are not a collection of polished facts and likable traits meant to gain approval.

You are a human being. Flawed, changing, trying.

You are allowed to be misunderstood.

There are people who will only ever know a paragraph of your story and swear they’ve read the whole book.

Let them.

You are not for everyone. You were never supposed to be. Not every soul will understand the language of your wounds. Not every eye can see the soft strength it takes to rebuild yourself quietly. Not every heart knows how to love what it cannot label.

You are not small just because someone else could not see your depth. You are not cold just because someone expected warmth in a moment you had none to give. You are not wrong for outgrowing who you used to be, for walking away, for choosing peace instead of pleasing.

Let them misunderstand the way you carry your softness. Let them question why you no longer show up to be dissected. Let them think you are unkind for setting boundaries, selfish for choosing solitude, difficult for protecting your peace. Let them be wrong about your healing, your silence, your softness that sometimes looks like distance.

You do not have to argue. You do not have to shrink. You do not have to become palatable.

Live. Keep going. Keep becoming.

They will see it one day — or they won’t.

Either way, it has never been your burden to make them understand.