The Trouble with Being Understood
The Gifted Search for Communion in a Misreading World.
I spent much of my life battling to be understood and expended vast amounts of energy translating myself. I edited my self to punch lines and taglines and elevator pitches: my brief synopsis of “Lil” was carefully punctuated and presented with conventional undertones and overtones. Nothing to read between the lines. Nuance be damned. No time for stories given the pressure of short attention spans. Here’s the dissected me – convenient and ready for consumption. And I was consumed, but that’s a story for another day. I did all this reducing and renouncing and repurposing because I thought that if someone understood my pre-packaged self then there was hope for the rest of my unpackaged self. The logic was impeccable, wasn’t it?
I’m not telling you this to elicit sympathy, but to emphasise how much I yearned to be seen and known in the fullness of my multidimensional self. It was a fraught endeavour, full of folly. Such is life.
However, lately, I’ve wondered: was it really understanding I was chasing? Or something deeper – primal, existential, even ancestral? Of course, it was something deeper…
The Gifted Yearning to Be Seen
For the gifted adult, understanding is oxygen. When you move through life with heightened perception, emotional intensity, and inner complexity, you exist in a different register. You notice the gaps, the inconsistencies, the beauty hiding under the ordinary. And yet, for most of your life, people misunderstand you.
You’re told you’re too much, too intense, too analytical, too sensitive, too abstract. You’re praised for your insight but punished for your depth. You learn to hide the very qualities that make you feel most alive.
To be understood is to feel less like an alien. It’s the hope that someone might finally speak your language without you having to translate it into something smaller. The energy it takes to translate is exhausting, but you do it because it’s second nature. Because it’s lonely if you don’t. Because you’re naturally a bridge-builder between worlds. Because there’s fear buried in your bones…
Misunderstanding is dangerous, even fatal.
The Ancestral Fear of Misunderstanding
Misunderstanding feels catastrophic to the sensitive psyche because, once upon a time, it was.
History is littered with the bones of the misunderstood: witches, heretics, prophets, artists. People whose difference was mistranslated as threat. To be misread was to be exiled, shamed, tortured, bullied, or burned.
That fear doesn’t vanish; it’s embedded in our nervous systems. Every time we’re misinterpreted, some deep ancestral memory whispers: “This is unsafe. You could lose everything.”
For the gifted person whose identity is already fragile from years of masking and self-doubt, misunderstanding becomes existentially perilous.
We need to be understood to confirm that we’re real, safe, worthy of belonging.
Understanding as Containment and Control
Does our pursuit of understanding hide a subtler motive?
To be understood is to feel contained in the way a bowl holds water. It provides edges, coherence, safety.
Yet this containment comes with a shadow: control.
When I want to be understood, I want to shape how I’m perceived. I want my narrative handled correctly, my motives seen accurately, my complexity appreciated in full.
There’s nothing wrong with that, except when it becomes a way of defending against the unpredictability of life. The need to be understood can quietly become the need to control how others see us, and thus, how safe we feel.
Unfortunately, understanding is never perfect. Every act of comprehension is an act of reduction. And that’s almost as scary as misunderstanding.
The Shadow Side of Understanding
Understanding, paradoxically, can both illuminate and obscure.
It brings comfort in its sense of order and predictability, but it also flattens the vastness of human mystery into something graspable.
To understand another person, we simplify them. We create a version of them our minds can hold. That version might be compassionate, but it’s never complete. True understanding requires humility: the awareness that we’re always perceiving through our own lenses, that what we “get” about someone is inevitably partial.
The shadow of understanding is arrogance – the belief that we can fully know another, or even ourselves. It can lead to intellectual colonisation: the subtle violence of categorising what should remain wild, unknowable, and alive.
To be seen too clearly can feel like dissection. I long to be known, but not consumed.
On Intellectual Colonisation
Every act of understanding, even when well-intentioned, carries the potential to become an act of colonisation. When we “understand” something, we render it legible to our existing frameworks: our language, our logic, our comfort zones. We make the unknown knowable by mapping it onto what we already believe.
This is intellectual colonisation: the urge to domesticate mystery. To claim ownership of what we comprehend - to classify, label, or theorise until it fits neatly into our mental architecture.
The Western intellectual tradition has long prized mastery: the drive to explain, categorise, and dominate through knowledge. Even our language betrays this impulse: we “grasp” concepts, “pin down” ideas, “nail” arguments, “capture” meaning. Knowledge becomes conquest.
But what happens to the things that resist capture – the fluid, the poetic, the experiential, the mystical, the philosophical? They’re dismissed as irrational, feminine, indigenous, spiritual, or unscientific. Entire ways of knowing have been exiled because they don’t conform to the logic of control.
The Cost of Over-Understanding
When understanding becomes colonisation, we lose contact with wonder. We lose the living pulse of what we seek to know. In our obsession with precision, we flatten paradox, domesticate ambiguity, and silence the languages of intuition, body, and imagination.
This is as true in personal relationships as it is in philosophy or science. When I try to fully understand you, I risk reducing you to a version of you that fits inside my frame. When I try to fully understand myself, I risk mistaking analysis for true insight.
To colonise is to remove aliveness from what we study. To decolonise is to restore reverence.
Decolonising Our Systems of Knowing
Decolonising our intellectual systems doesn’t mean rejecting knowledge or analysis. It means remembering plurality – the coexistence of many ways of knowing, many forms of truth. It asks us to unlearn the reflex that treats certainty as virtue and unknowing as failure.
To decolonise understanding means:
Restoring relationship.
Seeing knowledge not as something to be owned, but as participation. The observer is never separate from the observed. Understanding is relational, not extractive.Honouring ambiguity.
Letting paradox and mystery coexist without rushing to resolution. Allowing a question to remain open rather than conquered.Listening to silenced epistemologies.
Integrating indigenous wisdoms, embodied experience, ecological consciousness, and intuitive knowing as equally valid sources of truth.Practising epistemic humility.
Recognising that every worldview has edges, every theory has blind spots, every system leaves something out.Reclaiming imagination.
The poetic and the scientific aren’t enemies. Imagination expands cognition; it keeps our understanding porous and humane.
The Gifted Mind’s Liberation
For the gifted adult, this decolonisation is especially urgent. Giftedness, when shaped by traditional systems, often becomes a performance of intellect: an endless proving ground of mastery. We’re rewarded for analysis, not wonder; for control, not curiosity.
Giftedness in its liberated form doesn’t rely on being the smartest person in the room. It’s being the most alive: thinking with the body, feeling with the mind, and letting mystery be part of our vocabulary.
To decolonise one’s giftedness is to release it from the empire of intellect. To let it breathe, feel, and play again.
Towards a Decolonised Understanding
What if understanding was centred on kinship?
What if knowing something meant entering into a reciprocal relationship with it – listening as much as naming, attending as much as analysing?
To decolonise understanding is to trade control for curiosity, and communion. Rather than approach life as a puzzle to be solved, consider it more a field of relationships to tend with greater presence.
We become gardeners of a relational field.
Freedom lies in learning how to live, think, and feel beyond the colonising edge of our own minds.
The Philosophy of Misunderstanding
Misunderstanding is painful, but it also has philosophical value. It reminds us that there’s something irreducible about the unknowable. Our individuality, our consciousness, our soul, will always exceed the grasp of language or intellect.
In misunderstanding, we’re freed from the illusion that understanding equals love, or that comprehension equals safety. Misunderstanding forces us to live with ambiguity, to tolerate difference, to meet one another in the mystery rather than the map.
When I allow myself to be misunderstood, I relinquish control. I trust that my truth exists, even if unseen. Perhaps this is the deeper spiritual practice of adulthood: to stop fighting for understanding and start resting in integrity.
Understanding vs. Meaning-Making
Understanding and meaning-making often get conflated, but they’re not the same.
Understanding seeks explanation – it wants to know why. Meaning-making seeks coherence – it wants to feel whole.
Understanding is cognitive. Meaning is existential. You can understand something intellectually and still feel utterly lost. You can fail to understand something logically and still find it profoundly meaningful.
As a gifted adult, I’ve spent years trying to “understand” myself into peace: researching, analysing, decoding, theorising. It helped, to a point. But meaning came only when I stopped dissecting my experience and started inhabiting it.
Understanding wants mastery.
Meaning asks for surrender.
The Limits of Empathy
Even empathy, the most exalted form of understanding, has its limits. To empathise is to imagine another’s inner world, but imagination is never perfect. We can feel with someone, but never as them.
And maybe that’s okay. Maybe the beauty of human connection lies not in perfect empathy, but in mutual curiosity, that willingness to approach one another without the arrogance of full knowing.
Understanding may open the door, but reverence keeps us inside the room.
The Gifted Adult’s Reconciliation
I’m learning, slowly, that being understood is a beautiful thing, but it’s not the whole thing. I no longer need others to map me in full. I only need to remain true to the geography of my own being. And when I say this, I don’t mean staying true to some fixed object. I really do mean “geography” - a field that’s mutable.
When I release the desperate need to be understood, I make space for wonder again – for surprise, for the kind of connection that meets multidimensional souls.
Maybe the real task isn’t to be understood, but to be understanding: to bring curiosity, empathy, and humility to every encounter, including the one with myself.
The Gifted Soul and the Mystery
We who live intensely often fear that misunderstanding will erase us. But what if misunderstanding simply reminds us that we’re mysteries to be lived?
To be misunderstood is to remain vast. To be partially seen is to stay wild. And to understand, truly – ourselves, others, the world – is to know where knowledge ends and wonder begins.
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My goodness… I look forward to your writing for its clarity and insightfulness around complex topics. What you’ve done here is magnificent. Being understood has long been one of the challenges of my life. When I am, I’m in the flow. And when not, the going can become hellish.
What you’ve laid out here is a landscape I’ve not connected to before… yet it makes so much sense. It’s like finding the home you’ve long sought, but couldn’t describe. Or find on any map. You had to “just go” knowing you’d know it when you came to it.
Thank you.