"For most of my life, I asked myself a quiet question: What's wrong with me? I didn't say it out loud. I didn't have to. It was stitched into how I moved through the world - hyperaware, self-correcting, and always just a little out of step. I knew how to "pass" in the right settings, but never without effort. Underneath it all, I was exhausted by the daily performance of normal."
"I grew up in a home marked by emotional chaos and unpredictability. Like many kids with developmental trauma, I became hypervigilant before I even had words for it. I learned to track mood shifts, tones of voice, the silences between the words. While other kids were absorbing math lessons, I was reading the room. I was always paying attention-even if they said I was unfocused-just not in the way the teacher wanted me to."
"I also daydreamed. Constantly. I lived in fantasy worlds that I made up in my head, complete with characters, backstories, and dialogue. I wasn't trying to avoid reality-I was trying to survive it. And those imagined worlds were often kinder than the one I was stuck in. So when people say things like, "That child is so distractible," I want to pause them."
An individual grew up amid emotional chaos and unpredictability and developed hypervigilance and survival strategies in childhood. The person learned to read mood shifts, tones, and silences, prioritizing safety through middle-ground visibility in school. The person mastered masking behavior and "passing" but experienced deep exhaustion from performing normalcy. Attention patterns reflected constant environmental monitoring rather than academic inattentiveness. Imagined inner worlds and persistent daydreaming provided refuge and kinder alternatives to lived reality. Labels like "distractible" obscured adaptive survival skills and overlooked the underlying trauma-driven vigilance and need for safety.
Read at Tiny Buddha
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