THE WALL

THE WALL

"Reputation is the general belief or opinion that other people have about you." (citation)

They see a glacier.

I am a firestorm.

Even from a closer perspective, I seem untouchable.

„When I look at you, I see an iceberg“, says Dean, my colleague, his face filled with worry.

„When I look at you, I see ’Titanic’, don’t forget what happened there!“, I retort with an icy smile.

The queen of witty replies.

People mistake my silence for disinterest, my composure for cold confidence, my coolness for indifference. They see a calm sea beneath a clear sky and assume there are no currents underneath.

They do not see the storms.

They do not see the waves breaking against themselves in the dark.

I have become an expert at appearing whole while quietly falling apart.

The irony is almost beautiful in its cruelty.

The harder I struggle, the calmer I appear.

The more I care, the less it seems like I do.

The louder my heart screams, the softer my voice becomes.

And the gap widens between the person I am and the person they see.

A canyon.

A wound.

A mirror that reflects everything except the truth.

They call me cold because they cannot feel the fever of my thoughts.

They call me arrogant because they cannot feel the anxiety behind my silence.

They call me distant because they cannot see how much I need a human touch.

If they could step inside my mind for a moment, they would get lost. No GPS would help.

A maze of thoughts, images, ideas and memories, interspersed with strong emotions.

A thousand versions of every moment, replaying endlessly like birds trapped against glass.

Reality is a forest fire.

Appearance is the untouched horizon.

Reality is a house burning from the inside.

Appearance is a neatly painted picket fence and clean windows.

Reality is bleeding into your hands while convincing everyone you're uninjured.

Sometimes I wonder which version of me is more real.

The one the world sees, or the one I carry alone.

The strong one or the vulnerable one.

The person who walks through a room without hesitation, or the person whose thoughts unravel afterward in the darkness.

Perhaps both are true.

Perhaps that is the tragedy.

The people see my armour and mistake it for skin.

They see my walls and assume I am the strongest person alive.

"Sometimes I worry what will happen if you break down", Dean again.

"Worry you don't get hurt then!", I smile while putting my tongue out at him.

They fall in love with the illusion of my strength while remaining blind to my need to feel protected and cared for.

Beneath the surface, entire worlds collapse without making a sound.

You see, some disasters are loud whereas some are so quiet they can be mistaken for peace.

They say reputation only changes how strangers see you.

They're wrong.

A reputation that doesn't belong to you eventually begins to poison every relationship you touch.

Because every connection starts with a version of you that has already arrived before you.

People meet my silence before they meet my words.

They meet the mask before they meet the face.

They meet the rumour before they meet the person.

No matter how gently I reach for them, I can feel them holding the wrong image in their hands.

The tragedy is that relationships are built on being known.

Yet I spend mine allowing to be interpreted.

Translated.

Edited.

I could spend hours listening to someone talk about their fears, their heartbreaks, their dreams. I could memorize the sound of their laughter, notice when they're hurting before they say a word, carry pieces of them with me long after they've forgotten the conversation.

They walk away believing their story hasn’t touched me one bit while my heart cries for them.

My actions are my love language which makes my love difficult to read.

That kind of pain is hard to explain.

To give someone your whole heart and watch them mistake it for an empty gesture, or spend years trying to make someone feel understood while feeling invisible to them.

To be deeply loved for a version of yourself that doesn't exist, or worse, rejected for one that doesn't either.

Sometimes people tell me who they think I am and I smile, not because they're right but correcting them is more exhausting than being misunderstood.

But inside, something aches.

Because every false assumption becomes another brick in a wall I have never wanted built.

Eventually, I start mourning relationships that haven't even begun, not because we've grown apart while trying to get close but because I realize we've never occupied the same reality.

They know someone who looks like me.

I know someone they never met.

The cruellest moments happen when I finally let someone closer, when I carefully unfold parts of myself I've kept hidden for years. All the fears, insecurities, tenderness, loneliness, all my vulnerability, I lay it all down on the ground.

Even if they don't believe me, I feel relieved to be able to be myself.

What if the image they've built is stronger than the truth standing in front of them?

What if I've spent so long appearing unbreakable that nobody can recognize my wounds?

Sometimes I think that's why vulnerability hurts, not because showing your heart is hard, but because after showing it, there's no guarantee anyone will actually accept you for you. So I change my tack, just like Taylor Swift had to.

The more often I open up to hurt, the freer I feel.

I stop explaining.

I stop correcting.

I stop reaching out more than once or twice.

The contradiction of being your layered self becomes exhausting.

You spend so long being the personae that you slowly disappear from your own relationships.

You become quieter, more distant, not because that's who you are but because they start to feel threatened. Now they need to open up and be ready to bleed.

Yet some stubborn part of me keeps hoping for the rare person who looks beyond appearances who notices that confidence can live side by side fear, that silence can be overflowing emotion, that distance can be longing, and that the strongest-looking people are often the ones holding themselves together with shaking hands.

The kind of person who sees you.

And perhaps that's why the contrast hurts so much.

Not because people believe the wrong things about me.

But because beneath every misunderstanding is the same helpless wish:

If you could see the difference between my appearance and my reality, you might finally understand how much I was trying to love you all along.

Every relationship felt like standing behind glass.

We could see each other.

Yet somehow, we were always separated by a transparent wall and both of us waited with bated breath for the other one to break.

More than once, I was left watching from the other side, pressing my palms against the glass, wondering why no one could feel the warmth of my hands.

People often imagine misunderstanding as a small thing. A crossed wire. A minor inconvenience.

But sustained misunderstanding is a kind of exile.

It is being trapped on an island that appears connected to the mainland from a distance.

Everyone assumes they can reach you.

No one realizes the bridge washed away years ago.

You learn to smile.

You learn to tell people you're fine.

Meanwhile, entire galaxies exist between what they see and what is true.

The hardest part is that isolation doesn't always look like loneliness.

Sometimes it looks like friendship.

Sometimes it looks like love.

Sometimes you're sitting beside someone who swears they know you better than anyone else while feeling more alone than you've ever felt in your life.

What they know is the character, not the person.

And the heartbreak of being loved that way!

To have someone treasure the mask while remaining blind to the face beneath it.

To hear them describe you and realize they're describing the guard you hesitate to put down.

I often felt like a house with all the lights on and all the curtains drawn.

People could see the glow from outside.

They knew something was there.

But they never entered.

And after enough years of knocking on windows from the inside, even I began to forget what it felt like to be found.

That's what misunderstanding does.

It makes you a foreign language in your own life.

You speak.

People hear different words.

You offer support.

They call it indifference.

You withdraw because you're hurting.

They call it arrogance.

You remain silent because you're afraid.

They call it aloofness.

Every mistranslation places another mile between you and everyone else.

Eventually, isolation settles into your bones like winter, even in crowded spaces, in loving arms, in the middle of conversations.

They say physical intimacy is the most vulnerable you can be. Not for me. I enjoy it, open up completely and when it’s done, I get up, shower and leave. Or make them leave so that I can continue to be the prisoner mistaken for a queen.

The appearance is a star, bright and distant.

The reality is a dying sun collapsing under the weight of its own gravity.

The worst of all is that nobody means to misunderstand.

Most people are looking at the map they’ve been given.

They don't know the territory is different.

Yet, the island remains an island, the glass remains unbroken.

So many years of carrying a grief that has no funeral.

Grieving conversations that never truly happened.

Grieving connections that almost existed.

Grieving the unbearable possibility that people have spent their whole lives looking at you while never once actually seeing you.

Yet despite all of this, there is a part of me that refuses to disappear.

A small, stubborn flame that survives every winter.

Because every now and then, someone surprises me.

Someone pauses before accepting the story they've been handed.

Someone notices the crack in the glass.

Someone hears the strain behind the steady voice, the loneliness hidden inside the laughter, the tenderness buried beneath the silence.

And for the first time, it feels as though they're looking at you instead of through you.

They do not arrive carrying assumptions, but curiosity.

They do not try to name me but to get to know me.

And suddenly the island is not quite so isolated.

The ocean is not quite so wide.

The glass begins to look less like a wall and more like something that can break.

Perhaps that's the hope I've learned to hold onto:

Being misunderstood by many does not make understanding impossible.

A thousand distorted reflections cannot erase the truth of the original.

There are people patient enough to learn the language beneath the translation, willing to walk beyond the map and discover the territory for themselves.

I can never be understood by everyone. I just need to remain myself long enough for the right people to find me.

To leave the light on.

To keep the door unlocked.

To keep speaking in my own voice, even when the echo is louder.

Because one day, someone will hear it and help you shatter the glass.

They will realize that the person the world sees and the person I am will no longer feel like strangers standing on opposite shores. They will finally meet.

Not the clean glass of a window, but the thick, distorted glass of an aquarium.

I would press my words against it and watch them emerge on the other side warped into shapes I never intended.

I could see people standing only inches away, but their voices reached me as muffled echoes, as though we were speaking from opposite sides of deep water.

Sometimes I would place my hand against the barrier and imagine they could feel it.

The warmth.

The longing.

The human heart beating beneath it.

However, all they saw was their own reflection shimmering back at them.

The glass thickened with every misunderstanding.

A translucent prison built on assumptions.

I began to believe it was unbreakable.

Then one day, someone looked closer.

Close enough to notice the fractures.

Hairline cracks spreading beneath the surface, hidden beneath years of practiced composure.

They didn't strike the glass with force.

They simply stayed.

Asked another question.

Waited through the silence.

Listened to what I was trying to say instead of what it sounded like I was saying.

And suddenly I heard it:

A faint crack.

Then another.

Like a frozen lake remembering it was once water.

The barrier that had seemed solid began to splinter with threads of light.

Tiny rays slipped through the fractures and touched places inside me that had lived in darkness for years.

Then came the moment I thought would never happen.

The glass shattered.

Beautifully, with the sound of a thousand misunderstandings falling away at once.

The air rushed in, sharp and cold and real.

For the first time, there was no distortion between us.

No reflections.

No silhouettes.

Just two people, face to face, surrounded by the glittering remains of everything that had kept them apart.

And as the shards caught the light around our feet, they looked less like wreckage and more like proof:

Even the strongest walls are only fragile things pretending to be permanent.

And then the glass broke with the quiet ache of finally being understood.

For a moment, I didn't know what to do.

I had spent so long speaking through distortion that hearing my own voice returned to me unchanged felt almost unbearable.

It was like stepping out of deep water and realizing how hard I had been fighting to breathe.

Like setting down a weight I had carried for so long that I mistook it for part of my body.

Relief came first. It was overwhelming.

The kind that loosens something inside your chest and suddenly makes room for all the emotions you've been holding back.

Then came grief, immense and filled with decades of unshed tears.

It revealed everything I had lost.

All the years spent pressing my hands against invisible barriers.

All the nights spent wondering how to be accepted as a person I was and deal with rejection.

All the relationships that brushed against my soul without ever truly reaching it.

I mourned the version of myself that learned to expect misunderstanding, the version that stopped speaking because it no longer believed anyone was listening.

And beneath the grief, there was something even stranger.

Freedom.

When someone finally looks beyond the armour, there is nowhere left to hide. I wanted to be in the open, all of me, all the imperfections and brightness.

For a fleeting moment, I felt exposed as an open nerve.

As if one wrong movement could send me retreating behind the shattered wall.

But they stayed, bathing me in warmth of recognition.

It felt like sunlight entering a room that had forgotten it had windows.

Like the first spring after an endless winter.

Like hearing your name spoken correctly after years of answering to the wrong one.

And in that moment, I understood something.

The opposite of isolation is not company.

It is understanding.

Because a thousand people can surround you and still leave you alone.

Yet one person who truly sees you can make the entire world feel inhabited again.

I stood there among the broken shards and for the first time, I didn't see wreckage but the light, reflected in a thousand of small mirrors.

As the last pieces settled around my feet, I felt something I had nearly forgotten was possible:

Not the relief of escaping loneliness.

But the peace of no longer facing it alone.

And he said two most powerful sentences:

“I see you.”

“I got you.”

P.S. Citation source: "Reputation." Vocabulary.com Dictionary, Vocabulary.com, https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/reputation. Accessed 31 July 2026.