i don’t think a lot of friends know me that well

we speak the same language but you still don’t understand me

There are moments, fleeting as they are revealing, when I feel, almost viscerally, the limitations of language. I see it in the way someone responds to my words, or rather, to the shadow of them they have chosen to see. They smile, nod, and say “I get it,” but something in their eyes betrays a misalignment. I walk away from the exchange more invisible than before like the interaction has peeled away a layer I barely noticed myself wearing—a coat of my own camouflage. We can speak the same language and still understand one another so little that it borders on irony, like learning the rhythms of a song but missing the melody, knowing the dance moves but not the beats. It is as if I’m speaking from different languages stitched together by circumstance. I find myself rehearsing phrases, wondering if they’ll translate as I mean them, hoping that someone might catch the subtlety, the angle, the way the words catch light in my mind. It’s as if my true, raw and unvarnished language—exists in a private lexicon, inaccessible to most friends who’ve known me for years. It is here, in this dissonance, that I come to realise how isolated I am, despite the abundance of voices around me.

There is a fear that gnaws at the edges of these realisations—maybe I have grown accustomed to letting myself remain unknown. I’ve lived so long as a moving target, adapting to the pulse and rhythm of others, that I’ve grown skilled in the art of withholding myself. The irony, of course, is that I am still visible—visible in the way a ghost is visible, known through absence, defined by hollow spaces. In quiet, unguarded moments, this haunts me, the feeling that I’ve sacrificed true understanding for the comfort of near invisibility and fear of genuine vulnerability. Many of my friends describe me as “mysterious.” After graduating high school, a classmate told me nobody in our year group could figure me out. Recently, a friend told me, she knows me, but at the same time, she also doesn’t know a lot about me.

It is strange to feel that those closest to you may not know you that well, a sensation both chilling and oddly liberating. I begin to wonder—if they knew me better if I allowed myself to be fully seen, would their presence feel as steady, or would they dissipate like vapour at dawn? I wonder if a true connection is worth the risk of that unspooling, the shedding of illusions. I wonder, too, if they are asking the same questions, feeling the same hesitation that catches like a huge fire burning in my heart. This endless negotiation of visibility is exhausting, and yet it feels inevitable.

At times, I try to rationalise it—maybe I am hard to know, or maybe I have cultivated a way of being that encourages people to accept the exterior without questioning the depths. But part of me also believes that this phenomenon, this disconnect, isn’t an aberration but rather a rule of modern connection. That most friendships, most relationships, float on surfaces and skim over depths not out of malice or indifference, but because it is difficult, in this fractured world, to sink beneath the superficial. In this age of connection, we have perfected the art of skimming. We scroll past the difficult, the dense, the deeply felt, and we’ve learned to mimic understanding without grappling with its demands. “I get you,” people say, and I nod, and let it be enough—for them, and sometimes even for myself. It is too much energy to always be in-depth.

There is a strangeness in friendship, a peculiar negotiation between what we reveal and what we don’t, what we allow others to see and what we keep hidden. I’ve noticed the gaps—small, subtle places where conversation falters or shifts, where the air grows thick with a shared but unspoken acknowledgement—there are things we will never understand about each other. That is not for lack of trying or years of familiarity. It is something deeper, some irreducible mystery of self that no amount of talking, explaining or confessing can ever quite bridge. We move through life believing, at least on some fundamental level, that language will save us and ferry the deepest parts of ourselves across to those we love. Sometimes, it feels like an elaborate illusion, as if we’re all stranded on islands of experience, close enough to see each other but still separated by vast oceans. We reach out, shouting across the distance, and while our voices carry, the essence of what we are trying to say seems to fall away.

They say we speak the same language, and that shared words mean shared meaning. But there is something lonely in realising that the phrases you reach for—the ones you’ve always assumed would work—feel falling flat, that your words arrive hollow, stripped of the nuance you meant to convey. We talk, you and I, and it should be easy. It should feel simple. Yet I catch myself holding back, softening sharp edges or leaving entire thoughts unspoken. I try, and sometimes it even seems like you understand. But then something in your reaction, your laugh or nod, reminds me—no, you don’t see it. You’re listening to the version of me that exists in your mind, not to the person actually speaking. We all do this, I know. We all create silent versions of each other in our heads, and those versions never truly match. How can they? Our friends, our lovers, our acquaintances, our coworkers and colleagues—they know the pieces we give them, the stories we choose to tell, and the chapters we omit. There are histories written in silence, entire maps of who we are even if we struggle to navigate. I used to believe if I shared enough, revealed enough, I’d feel truly seen. Now I am not so sure. True understanding is a fragile art that disappears when grasped too firmly.

Sometimes, it strikes me that they’re more comfortable with who they believe I am than who I actually might be. Maybe I’ve made this easy. We all slip into personas and adopt masks that simplify us for the sake of harmony and ease of connection. Maybe I've curated a version of myself for them without even realising it, and now, looking back, I see the ways I’ve allowed myself to become an easy narrative—a story that can be read quickly, a sketch instead of a whole picture. It’s simpler this way, isn’t it? It’s safer. There’s less risk of them encountering the messier parts, the complicated edges, the parts of me that resist tidy classification. This leaves me in a strange limbo. I feel known, in the way one might know a character from a beloved book. They know my patterns, my routines, my preferences, the way I laugh or the way I always seem to order the same thing when I’m in a new place and far from home. I know them in the same way. But beneath that surface knowledge, there are layers neither of us will ever reach—assuming neither doesn’t take the courage to be vulnerable. I think of all the times I’ve left a conversation feeling inexplicably hollow, sensing something essential was missing; a moment of truth that remained lodged inside, never finding a way out.

It’s not that I want to be unknown, not exactly. However, there is a quiet resentment that builds up inside me, a feeling of wanting to break free from these pre-constructed versions of myself, to scream, “STOP ACTING LIKE YOU KNOW WHO I AM.” Because they don’t. They know the echoes, the shadows, the reflections, but they don’t know the source. I wonder what would happen if I dropped the act altogether, if I stopped softening my words, if I let them in on the unscripted, unpolished truths. Would they turn away? Would they see me with new eyes, or would they double down, insisting on the simpler story, the one they’ve decided to believe? And maybe the problem lies in the language itself. We cling to words, to phrases we’ve heard before, relying on their weight to carry us across. But language is imprecise, slippery. It’s like trying to catch water in your hands—just when you think you’ve got it, it slips away. There are things I feel that defy articulation, things that seem too vast, too tangled, to ever fit into a single sentence. And so I leave them out, unable to share what I can’t even describe. It’s easier, and less painful, to let others believe they understand me.

I do find some comfort in this, in knowing that I can never be fully known. It grants me a strange kind of freedom, the freedom to be endlessly, beautifully misunderstood. People do not need to understand every part of me, and in turn, I become a free swan.

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“We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.” — Anaïs Nin