You Don’t Know Me From the Parts You’ve Seen
I have been misunderstood so many times that sometimes I wonder if people realize how much of a person they can erase simply by deciding they already know her.
It is always something small.
One habit. One story. One afternoon. One version of me that happened to exist in front of them.
And somehow, that becomes the whole me.
“She’s so talkative.”
For most of my life, I was the opposite of talkative. I learned early how to keep certain things out of my voice. Anger. Hurt. Disappointment. Even at home, where I was supposed to be allowed to feel whatever I felt, I became so practiced at swallowing it that silence eventually stopped feeling like a choice.
So yes, I can be loud now.
But I am only loud where I feel safe enough to be.
There is a difference between being talkative and being known.
I can tell you stories for hours and still keep the things that matter most to myself. I can laugh easily without telling you what keeps me awake. I can make people comfortable around me without giving them access to everything I am. I know how to keep other people’s secrets. I know there are things you are allowed to know and things you are not.
People seem to have trouble with that distinction.
They see one room of my life and assume they have seen the whole house.
Maybe that is why being called spoiled has always felt strange to me.
“Must be nice.”
“You’re probably spoiled.”
“You guys must be rich.”
An eldest daughter from a lower-middle class. My parents both work. We have always had food, shelter, and the things we needed. There were times we could afford things that other people could not. There were small luxuries. I am not going to rewrite my childhood into poverty just to make my struggles easier to believe.
But having your needs met is not the same thing as having an easy life.
We never really had a permanent home. Up until now. We moved enough that leaving became ordinary. There was always another place to adjust to, another set of walls to memorize, another address that was temporary in ways nobody bothered to say out loud.
Sometimes I joke that I grew up NPA, no permanent address.
It is easier to make a joke out of instability than to explain what it feels like to never become entirely attached to a place.
My parents were never particularly good with money, either. There were decisions I could not understand, expenses that seemed irrational, situations that could have been avoided. I learned early that financial problems were not always announced. Sometimes they simply changed the atmosphere of a room.
We did not talk about those things outside the family.
Maybe that was pride.
Maybe it was shame.
Maybe I simply grew up believing that some problems become more humiliating once other people know about them.
I have always had too much pride to look needy.
Being the eldest probably made that worse.
There was an unspoken rule I seemed to invent for myself: balance.
If my younger sibling wanted something, I could wait.
If they asked, I did not have to.
If there was only enough for one person, I could tell myself I did not really want it anyway.
Nobody explicitly asked me to become that person. I just kept becoming her until it felt unnatural to want anything without first checking whether someone else needed it more.
My brother learned to ask for things freely.
I learned not to.
Somewhere along the way, I confused being independent with being undeserving of care.
I became the person who was supposed to be fine.
The one who did not need much attention.
The one who could figure things out.
The one who could adjust.
There are things about my family that I rarely explain because explaining them would mean opening a history I do not know how to summarize. There are kinds of anger I learned to be afraid of. There are biases I learned to anticipate. There is a distance between me and my father that has existed for so long that calling it distance almost feels too simple.
And there are years of being made to feel small in ways that become difficult to describe precisely because they happened so often.
You do not always remember every insult.
Sometimes you only remember what they taught you to believe about yourself.
So when someone looks at me and says, “You’re so expensive,” I almost want to ask them which version of my life they think they are talking about.
I spend my own money.
The money I earned.
The money I worked for.
The money I used to buy things I once could only look at and think, maybe someday.
Maybe that is why I like buying food for myself now.
Not because I have suddenly become extravagant, but because there is something quietly satisfying about no longer having to stare at something I want and immediately calculate whether I am allowed to want it.
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Even then, I still think of everyone else.
If I go somewhere alone, I often come home with something for my family.
A little pasalubong.
Something I saw and thought they might like.
Something I could have kept for myself but did not.
Even food at home becomes another small exercise in disappearing. We divide things equally, but sometimes my brother finishes his and takes from mine. And more often than I want to admit, I let him.
Then later I wonder why giving myself the same generosity I give everyone else feels so unnatural.
I have had people tell me they could never keep up with the way I spend.
The strange part is that I never asked them to.
I never needed someone to match me peso for peso. I have spent on people I cared about without keeping a mental receipt of what they owed me.
There have also been people who could afford to give me almost anything and still could not understand me.
Money can buy dinner.
It cannot buy emotional intelligence.
It cannot make someone notice when your silence means something.
It cannot teach someone how to listen to the things you are not saying.
I think that is one of the strangest things about being misunderstood. People are rarely wrong about what they see. They are wrong about what they think it means.
They see me spending money and decide I have never had to worry about it.
They see me laughing and decide my life must be light.
They hear me talk for hours and decide I must have nothing to hide.
They see me give easily and assume I have always been given to.
They see me handle things alone and mistake it for never having needed anyone.
None of those things are entirely false.
I really am the girl who laughs loudly.
I really do spend money on things I like.
I really do bring food home.
I really do give more than I probably should.
I really can take care of myself.
But a person can be all of those things and still carry an entirely different life underneath them.
Maybe that is what bothers me most. Not that people misunderstand me. That they become so certain they understand me.
They take a handful of visible things, arrange them into a shape they recognize, and then stop looking.
A personality assembled from evidence.
A childhood reconstructed from spending habits.
A family inferred from photographs.
A person reduced to whatever version of her happened to be convenient for the observer.
I have spent enough of my life being misunderstood to know that correcting people is exhausting.
So I don’t anymore.
If you think I am spoiled, you can.
If you think I am too much, you can.
If you think I have an easy life because I know how to enjoy it, you can.
I have no interest in dragging every hidden part of myself into the light just to win an argument about who I am.
There are things about me that I have not told you because I was not ready.
There are things I have not told you because I did not know how.
There are things I have not told you because some parts of a person do not become more real simply because they have been explained.
You can know my favorite food.
You can know the stories I tell when I am comfortable.
You can know how I laugh, how much I talk, how often I spend, how easily I give.
You can know the version of me that I decided was safe enough for you to see.
And still not know me.
Because what you saw was never a lie.
It was simply never the whole truth.
You don’t know me from the parts I’ve shown you.
You know the parts I survived well enough to let you see.
