#coping?

<3

Whose idea was it that we should be coping? -- Michael Lipsey

I was today years old when I realized a lot of how and who I (the how is important) am comes from an adolescence where smartness felt unsafe and having to be deeply hidden, so I learned to hide it deeply and play around with what I could do with that. Thoughts and systems, my own ideography, analyzing people, predicting behaviours, learning tremendous amounts about other people while revealing absolutely nothing about myself (most people only care to talk about themselves and care nothing at all for even who they're talking to, it's very exploitable), code switching (I've gotten better at recognizing when I am), calibrating who I am to who I'm interacting with, puzzles, writing, art, mostly hidden or deliberately indecipherable, playing with expectations, asking for help in order to evaluate the other person, pretending I don't know so I can learn what the other person does know, figuring out other peoples bullshit by being strategic with my own - and other things like that. It wasn't safe to be better than other people or even to be who I was, so I learned how to be other things. It's weird recognizing when I'm still operating from adolescent threat assements in contexts where I'm actually safe now, and don't have to be invisible just to exist. No wonder I latch on to the characters I do. I guess I got a lot wrong still to unlearn.