My life as a series of vignettes

On being shaped by pressure, protected by pragmatism, and held together by voice

I feel completely disconnected from my life as a narrative. I know the moments that brought me here: I can point to them, name them, place them like pins on a map, but I don’t feel tethered to them. They hover around me like artifacts I once touched but no longer own. Each moment pops into the next without warning, without ceremony, without the courtesy of a transition. I can’t tell if this is a quirk of memory or some deeper character flaw, if it’s even a flaw at all. (My memory is good, just selective.)

This selectivity means I get to choose the memories I keep. I decide which vignettes are worth holding onto. I write them down, bottle them, and by rereading them, I relive those moments in their entirety. Some memories feel like part of me; others feel like strangers I refuse to let in. It’s easier to bury certain things than pretend they deserve revisiting.

Contemporary psychotherapy revolves around reflecting on the past. I know I experienced a tremendous amount of pressure as a child– nothing overtly physical, but still burdensome in retrospect. That pressure forged certain qualities in me: hardness, relentlessness, a particular way of moving through the world. Accepting this prevents me from thinking of myself as “damaged goods.” It gives shape to who I became without forcing me to romanticize the suffering itself.

I am sensitive to the sound of footsteps approaching a room; I can tell you exactly who it is. I can sense rejection before it’s spoken out loud. I leave a room the second I feel unwanted. I learned early that staying small kept me safe. Later, I learned it also made me invisible. Somewhere in the middle, I became the crutch and the fixer, someone who provides solutions where none seem possible. But I don’t offer pity. Don’t pity me. I can smell pity before it even arrives, and I refuse to accept it. It feels like poison dressed as compassion.

This isn’t trauma I parade around. It’s a skillset I carry deep in my bones. It made me ruthlessly pragmatic. I don’t have patience for wallowing, for theatrics, for performative fragility. My own strife made me build a fortress I’ve never truly stepped out of. Self-reliance became both armor and identity. Outside the soft politics of social grace, I am a rock. I keep moving because stopping feels dangerous. I don’t know if that’s strength or self-preservation or something more complicated I haven’t named yet.

As a result, I feel disconnected from my physicality, my résumé, my pedigree, my history. These are facts, but they are not my truth. The truth is that I am a set of evolving principles housed in a temporary body, a conscious will trying to do better. It’s freeing to realize you’re just a person and that most rules are fiction stitched together by people too frightened to improvise. The only real prison is the one you don’t recognize as such.

This freedom comes with complications. When I disregard the expectations people place on me, especially the superficial ones, it unsettles them. It breaks their sense of continuity. If I can reinvent myself on a whim, why can’t they? When people insist they “can’t” do something, I rarely believe them anymore; most people do exactly what they want but tell themselves more palatable stories about it. Untethering myself from narrative also removed my excuses. If I can climb out of my own restraints, I expect others to at least tug at theirs.

(I admit I can’t escape my voice, though. No matter how many personas I outgrow, my voice clings to me. My written voice, my spoken voice, in the shape of my sentences, in the rhythm of my thoughts, follows me into every room. Even when I want silence, when I want to disappear into wordlessness, something in me keeps narrating.)

Writing is my loophole; my way of creating the slightest illusion of continuity. I don’t believe in the myth of a unified self, but I do believe in the coherence of voice. Every time I reread what I’ve written, I trick myself into existing for a little longer, stringing together moments that would otherwise dissipate. Maybe that’s the closest thing I have to a narrative: not a life with meaning, but a record of attention.

I won’t pretend this makes me easier to understand. It doesn’t even make it easier for me. But if my life is a string of vignettes, then I’ll choose them myself. I’ll write the ones that matter, delete the ones that don’t, and keep walking between scenes like someone who knows the story was never the point.