I used to write a lot about spirituality. Understanding. Detachment. Looking inward.

I still believe in looking inward. I’m just increasingly tired of how rarely people turn that lens on themselves before deciding what is wrong with somebody else.

Somewhere along the way, “discernment” seems to have become a respectable word for judgment without curiosity.

Someone speaks differently. Responds intensely. Doesn’t follow the social script. Suddenly, there’s a look. A joke. A little exchange between people who have quietly agreed that this person is odd.

Did anyone ask a question?

Did anyone wonder what they were missing?

Or was feeling normal together more satisfying than understanding someone?

I’ve watched this happen with people I’ve known for years. Sometimes I step back from the conversation and just observe. The interruption. The smile when someone else is speaking. The way a person becomes more dismissive once they have an audience.

I notice those things. Sometimes I don’t know what they mean yet. Sometimes a pattern becomes clearer over time.

There is a particular arrogance in assuming that someone who moves through the world differently must understand less of it.

You might be laughing at someone who has noticed the distance between how you describe yourself and how you treat people. Someone who has heard every interruption, every small dismissal, every joke you later explain away.

You’ve decided they lack social awareness. Have you considered examining your own?

I don’t always want to explain how my mind works. I don’t want to hand over a diagnosis before someone decides I deserve basic respect. I also don’t want to keep editing out parts of myself so that other people can remain comfortable with their assumptions.

That leaves me in an awkward place: wanting to be understood while resenting the expectation that I must make myself understandable to people who haven’t bothered to ask.

Sometimes I experience my perception as a kind of superpower. I can connect details quickly. Hear a change in tone. Notice when words and behavior stop matching.

That doesn’t make me infallible. I can misread someone. Old wounds can influence what I think I’m seeing. If I’m asking for curiosity, I have to leave room for it too.

Still, uncertainty about an interpretation doesn’t erase the behavior that prompted it.

I can question what your laugh meant and still tell you it hurt. I can reconsider your intentions and still notice that you never asked about mine.

These days, I often say less. There are conversations I don’t enter because I expect the effort will go into defending someone’s self-image, with very little left for examining what actually happened.

I’m tired of that.

I’m tired of ego spilling into every shared space and everyone else having to step around it. Tired of confidence being mistaken for insight. Tired of watching contempt pass as humor, then being told the person who noticed it is too sensitive.

I recognize the same appetite in our politics: the audience, the performance, the need to win at somebody else’s expense. I find it exhausting in public leadership and painful around a dinner table.

My spirituality hasn’t disappeared. My patience for using spiritual language to soften every uncomfortable truth has.

I can reflect on my part. I can apologize when I’m wrong. I can keep learning how to live with people.

I also get to ask them to do some fucking work.

Before you decide someone is strange, difficult, dramatic, or too much, ask them a real question.

Then stay quiet long enough to hear the answer.