For a long time, one of my strongest needs was to be understood.
I think that need began early, in childhood. I remember the feeling that what I experienced inside never reached other people in the same form I felt it. They saw the reaction, but not what had caused it. They saw the tears, the silence, the resistance, but not the fear, helplessness, or pain beneath them.
I learned to explain everything. To search for the right words. To revisit the same story and tell it again, more clearly. To add context. To repair misunderstandings. To make sure the person in front of me didn’t leave with the wrong image of who I was.
For me, being understood was a condition for feeling safe in a relationship.
And too often, I wasn’t.
The first time I was cast as the villain in someone else’s story, I was around twenty years old. I had ended a relationship with someone who loved me. His pain was real, and I understood why, in his story, I became the person who had hurt him. It made sense. I wasn’t a bad person, but I was the person who had caused his pain. I could tell the difference.
Later, I encountered a much harder version of the same experience: receiving, in the story of someone I deeply loved, a role I didn’t recognize at all.
Usually, I can tolerate the fact that people in general may have a poor opinion of me. But this time it hurt because that opinion came from someone who had known me intimately. Someone to whom I had shown my most vulnerable parts. Someone in whom I had invested so much. And it was precisely that closeness that made the verdict so difficult to challenge.
This has happened to me three times in my life, and it still haunts me.
At first, I tried to explain. I believed some information was missing, and that once I shared it, everything would fall into place. I went back to the events, added context, tried to express more clearly what I had thought and felt.
But with every explanation, I felt as though I were crashing into the solid wall of an image that had already been formed.
There was no longer any room for my experience.
So I began searching inside myself for the person they believed I was, because I had always trusted other people’s opinions more than my own. And of all people, I trusted most those who thought poorly of me.
Often, they were the people closest to me. The ones who had seen every version of me. They knew my fears, my weaknesses, the reactions I wasn’t proud of. Because of that, I believed their judgment had to be true.
“They know me better,” I told myself. “They know who I really am.”
I didn’t believe the people who saw me kindly with the same ease.
I assumed they simply hadn’t spent enough time with me. That they had only met the presentable version of me. That they had never seen me inside the intimacy of a relationship.
Sometimes I even believed that if they had a good opinion of me, I had somehow deceived them. Not intentionally. They just hadn’t come close enough to discover the truth.
A compliment disappeared within minutes.
A harsh sentence from someone I loved could stay with me for decades.
A positive opinion was easy to dismiss: They don’t really know me.
A negative one felt impossible to question: They know me deeply, therefore it must be true.
So I began accepting as truth the very opinions that wounded me the most.
For a long time, they also matched what I secretly believed about myself: that perhaps something was fundamentally wrong with me. That no matter how hard I tried to be good, anyone who came close enough would eventually discover the opposite.
I started doubting my own memories.
Were my intentions really what I believed they had been?
Was I lying to myself?
Did other people see something in me that I was too blind, or too afraid, to recognize?
Little by little, I lost trust in my own experience.
I no longer knew how to listen to my intuition.
Every memory could be wrong.
Every feeling could be an exaggeration.
Every explanation could simply be an excuse.
The other person’s interpretation became more believable than everything I knew about myself.
For a long time, it never occurred to me that closeness does not give someone unlimited access to the truth about who I am.
Someone may know my habits, my fears, my most shameful moments, and still see me through the lens of their own wounds and pain.
They may know many facts about my life while understanding very little about who I actually am.
They may witness my reactions without ever knowing the inner story from which those reactions emerged.
I had confused closeness with insight.
I believed the person who knew me most vulnerably also knew me most accurately.
I believed the person who spoke with certainty must be right.
I believed a harsh gaze was more truthful than a gentle one.
Today, I am no longer so sure.
I try not to reject what people tell me simply because it hurts.
I know I make mistakes.
I have reactions I regret.
I have said things that hurt others, even when I never intended to.
There have been moments when I didn’t know how to love someone in the way they needed, even though I loved them as best as I knew how.
I try to look honestly at what I have done and take responsibility for what truly belongs to me.
I also try to stop turning every mistake into a life sentence about who I am.
Someone else’s suffering does not automatically prove that I caused all of it.
The fact that someone feels hurt by me does not make every interpretation of my intentions true.
I can acknowledge another person’s pain without accepting every conclusion they draw about me.
It is still difficult for me to accept being misunderstood.
Part of me still wants to return and explain everything one more time.
To find the perfect sentence that will finally put everything in order.
To tell the story so clearly that the other person can no longer remain inside their version of it.
But not every misunderstanding can be repaired by a better explanation.
Sometimes the other person doesn’t want to hear.
Sometimes they can’t.
Sometimes they need the story to remain exactly as they have constructed it.
Respecting that doesn’t mean agreeing with it.
I accept that I do not have access to another person’s mind, and I cannot force anyone to see me the way I see myself.
I can speak my truth.
I can own my mistakes.
I can repair what can still be repaired.
But I cannot control the role I receive in someone else’s story.
This is where my need to be understood collides with reality.
Not everyone I long to be understood by will ever truly understand me.
Some people will forever hold an image of me that hurts.
Some have made it clear that they aren’t interested in hearing my explanation.
Those are real losses.
For me, they come with deep grief.
Because I didn’t lose only the relationship.
I also lost the hope that I would one day be truly seen by the people from whom I wanted that most.
I am learning to stop treating another person’s misunderstanding as an emergency I have to solve.
I am learning to bring my need to be understood to people who can actually make room for it.
To relationships where I can be heard without being immediately judged, but also without being idealized.
To people who can tell me where I was wrong without reducing me to my mistakes.
Most importantly, I am learning to understand myself.
To stay close to my own experience long enough to ask honest questions:
What really happened?
What did I do?
What are the consequences?
What belongs to me?
What do I regret?
What do I know about my intentions?
What would I change if I could?
What guilt have I carried simply because someone else spoke with greater certainty than I did?
I don’t always like the answers.
I have found mistakes.
Moments when I hurt people.
Moments when I defended myself, shut down, or expected from others what they couldn’t give.
But I have also found guilt that never belonged to me.
Understanding myself doesn’t mean declaring myself innocent.
I can hold two truths at the same time:
That I have made mistakes, and that I am not only my mistakes.
That I have hurt people, and that my intentions were not always the ones others assigned to me.
That I can take responsibility without accepting every verdict.
My need to be understood has not disappeared.
It probably never will.
It belongs to the child who wanted to say:
“That’s not the whole story. There’s something you don’t see.”
Today, I try not to send that child knocking on door after door, asking every person to tell them who they are.
Instead, I try to stay with that child myself.
I cannot choose the role I receive in other people’s stories.
But I can choose not to abandon myself when someone casts me in a role I no longer recognize.