The Inner Lens

Tag: healing

  • 9. Let them wander

    Your reputation is built through consistent action over time, not through desperate attempts to manage every interpretation of your character – It is not your job to make sure everyone’s perception of you is accurate.

    We all carry a heavy load in the quiet, unseen corners of our hearts, we are familiar with it as the weight of how we are seen by others. How we are perceived, defined, and boxed in by the label’s others attach to us. And often, too often, we make the mistake of believing that how others see us is how we are. But the truth is, perception is a fragile, fleeting thing. It shifts with every passing moment, every passing thought. Perception of something is not permanent – It’s not grounded in our essence, our truth. It’s grounded in how the observer chooses to see, or fails to see, us.

    There is a particular kind of sadness in being misunderstood, a sadness that cuts so deep because it feels like it challenges the very core of who we are. It’s painful when the ones who are supposed to know us best, our family, our friends, the ones we’ve shared the most intimate moments with, misread us, judge us, or, even worse, hold us to expectations that were never ours to begin with. They might look at us and see who they want to see, not who we truly are. They might see the mistakes we’ve made, the missteps we’ve taken, the parts of us we’ve outgrown, and mistakenly decide that this is who we will always be.

    We operate under a comforting fiction that if we just work hard enough, explain ourselves clearly enough, or plan meticulously enough, we can shape our reality exactly as we want it. This belief drives us to over function, over explain, and over worry. We rehearse conversations that may never happen. We structure elaborate defences against misunderstandings. We treat every setback as a problem to be solved rather than a reality to be acknowledged.

    The truth is far simpler and far more liberating. Most of what happens in our lives exists outside our sphere of influence. People will form opinions about us based on their own experiences, wounds, and perspectives, not on our carefully crafted explanations. Circumstances will shift in ways we never anticipated. Days will unfold badly despite our best intentions.

    This isn’t pessimism. It’s clarity.

    There are things that consume more energy than the need to be understood. When someone misreads our intentions or misconstrues our words, something in us is irked. We feel compelled to set the record straight, to make them see the truth, to ensure they know who we really are.

    But that urgency only reveals that we’re trying to control someone else’s inner world. We’re insisting that their perception must align with our intention. And in doing so, we give away our peace to anyone willing to misunderstand us. The people who matter will give you the benefit of the doubt. The people who don’t won’t be convinced by your explanations anyway. Your reputation is built through consistent action over time, not through desperate attempts to manage every interpretation of your character. Being misunderstood is not a crisis. It’s a natural consequence of being human in a complex world where everyone carries different lenses.

    So – what do we do with this hurt? How do we carry the weight of being misunderstood, especially by those we love?

    The first step, I believe, is to realize something painful yet liberating: you don’t owe anyone your authenticity. Not even the ones you love most. Not even those who have known you your entire life. You don’t owe them the version of yourself they are comfortable with.

    The truth is no one can fully understand the complexity of another human being. No matter how much they love you, no matter how much they think they know you, they will never, ever have the full picture. They will see parts of you through the lens of their own life, their own experiences, their own assumptions. They will fill in the gaps with what they think is true, and sometimes, that truth is so far from the real thing, it’s almost laughable.

    But here’s the thing: they don’t need to understand you to love you. And you don’t need to be understood to live in your truth. And it is also not your job to make sure everyone’s perception of you is accurate.

    Let them be wrong about you. Let them misunderstand your choices, your silence, your decisions. Let them mistake your independence for arrogance, your strength for coldness, your need for space for rejection. Let them label you with the words that fit their expectations. Let them be wrong. Because, in their misunderstanding, there is a deep freedom for you.

    The most freeing thing you can do is to stop trying to prove yourself to anyone. Stop waiting for their approval, their validation, their understanding. Live fully in the person you are becoming, even when they can’t see the evolution. Live your truth even when it makes them uncomfortable, even when they challenge you, even when they want to pull you back into the small box they’ve created for you.

    I’ve often thought about how painful it is when the people who are supposed to be your biggest supporters, the ones who’ve watched you grow, don’t understand the reasons behind your decisions. They see you changing, and their instinct is to hold on to the person you were before. But you have to change. Growth means leaving behind the person you were and stepping into the person you are becoming. And sometimes, people who love you can’t let go of the version of you they feel comfortable with.

    The hardest part is not letting their misconceptions break you. It’s not allowing their judgments to shape your identity. It’s allowing them to be wrong, and still, remaining unapologetically who you are.

    Let them be wrong about your decisions. Let them be wrong about your relationships. Let them be wrong about your career, your dreams, your fears, and the way you navigate the world. Their judgment will never define you unless you give it the power to. The weight of their wrongness is theirs to carry, not yours.

    We spend so much of our lives trying to get others to see us the way we see ourselves. We want them to understand the reasons behind our choices, the deep, personal motivations that drive us. But in the process, we lose sight of something essential: our worth is not bound by their understanding. Your worth is something intrinsic, something that can’t be captured by their limited view of you. It’s something deeper, something richer. And while you might long for them to understand, the truth is, their understanding isn’t what makes you valid.

    This doesn’t mean you shut yourself off from the people you love. This doesn’t mean you stop sharing, stop explaining, stop striving for connection. It simply means that you have to give yourself permission to be misunderstood. You have to allow others to hold opinions about you that are not rooted in the full reality of who you are. Because at the end of the day, their opinions are just that, opinions. And while their love and care matter, their ability to grasp every nuance of who you are does not.

    This might be the most painful lesson you’ll ever learn, but it’s also the most freeing: you can still be loved, still be accepted, and still be enough, even when others get it wrong.

    There will be moments when those who love you most will misinterpret your silence, misread your intentions, or question your choices. And in those moments, it’s important to remember that their wrongness doesn’t invalidate you. Their inability to see you as you truly are doesn’t diminish your worth. It only reveals their limitations, not yours.

    You’ve tried handing them a map of who you are — every path carefully drawn, every detour explained, as if clarity could guarantee understanding. You wanted this map to be easy to read, to spare them the effort of getting lost. But people rarely follow the directions you give them, that’s the thing about giving people a map, most won’t read it. They’ll glance once, fold it the wrong way, and still wander off in their own direction. They take shortcuts through your silences, mistake your stillness for walls, your depth for danger.

     You need to learn to stop drawing these maps for people who only spare a singular glance, to stop drawing paths for people who never intended to walk them carefully. Let them wander instead. If they mistake the forest for a maze, that’s on them. The truth has always been here — steady as the trees, patient as the roots. Some people will circle for years and call it confusion; others will stand still long enough to notice the clearing.

    So, let them be wrong. Let them misunderstand you. Let them make judgments from a place of limited perspective. You are not defined by what they think of you. You are not defined by their opinions. You are defined by your truth, your authenticity, your courage to be who you are, regardless of whether they see it or not.

    Peace doesn’t arrive when everything goes right. It emerges when you stop requiring everything to go right. It shows up in the quiet moments when someone misunderstands you and you choose not to spiral into explanation.

     Because one day, when they look back, they will see what you’ve always known: that the truest thing about you was never their perception of you, but the quiet, unwavering conviction you held in your own heart. And in the meantime, let them be wrong. Let them think what they will.

    Your life is yours to live, no one else’s.

  • 6. The Pulse Of Persistence

    Life’s refusal to stop for our pain is not a punishment – It is the mechanism of our healing.

    An interaction I’ll always remember is when I had booked an uber. My driver was a man named Bekim, half Croatian, half Albanian, somewhere in his late 40s. He had more history to his name than one could imagine, a mouth that held a passion to express the chaos of politics; a heart which held tightly his culture and sole identity. He held a contained fatherly anger towards the world, as he spoke about his 8-year-old daughter and how her teachers didn’t bother to grasp the beauties and melodies of her rich name. He had transformed my hour journey to a few minutes. A few minutes that poured the presence of meeting someone who you needed to meet, to tell you what you needed to hear.

    As I sat quietly listening, he advised me to keep fighting- to never give up even if the entire world was against me. Alas we had reached my destination and the journey ended with him becoming a stranger once again, a stranger who changed my perspectives – a stranger whose name ill never be able to erase from my mind. One thing he said that I’ll never forget is – ‘you’re not allowed to worry about problems that have solutions.’

    Three years later, I’ve come to understand the sole meaning behind what he meant. As humans we tend to view inconveniences as a jarring concept, and in some cases, a catastrophe. How many times have we utterly lost it over small things, like our car breaking down, not getting immediate text replies, losing things, plans being ruined. We bleed energy that we don’t even have to begin with into things that was never ours to carry. These things aren’t unsolvable; they are just uncomfortable because we want perfection out of our lives instead of just rolling with the punches.

    Inconvenience isn’t a catastrophe, as annoying and uncomfortable it is to have a pebble in your shoe, they are not boulders in our path. They are things we can deal with and keep walking; it’s not something that completely stops us. If we fall apart over the little things in life, how are we, how are you, going to survive the big things that life unfortunately has to offer? How will you get through life, if you freak out every time your car breaks down, or you don’t receive a reply, or you don’t know where you placed your keys?

    And this is where I thought about the bigger problems. What about the bigger things, the things that drain us entirely. If we aren’t allowed to worry about the things that have solutions, then what about the things that feel like they don’t have solutions?

    And this is where Bekims words echoed once more – ‘keep fighting, never give up even if the entire world is against you’. Problems are inevitable, we can’t avoid them, but the more you stress about the little things, the more control life has over you – and when we do face the bigger problems, that’s when life completely consumes us with control.

    The first and hardest truth we have to accept is this: life doesn’t stop for anyone. Not for heartbreak, not for grief, not even for the moments that feel massive that it becomes excruciating.

    You could lose everything you thought you couldn’t live without – whether it is a person, a dream, a version of yourself that once felt secure – and yet, somewhere, not so far from where you stand breaking apart, a stranger will be falling in love for the very first time, a child will be laughing so hard they can barley breathe, a grocery store will be restocking its shelves with a quiet, ordinary insistence, as if the world hasn’t shifted at all.

    It feels cruel sometimes, the way life keeps moving forward, indifferent to whether you are able to move with it, the way hours and days and years continue to spill out across the floor of your life even when you have nothing left inside you to meet them.

    Maybe, deep down, a part of us expects, wants, the world to slow down out of respect for our losses. We believe, so heavily within our aching souls, that time should pause, that the noise and the rhythm of daily life should quiet itself long enough to catch your breath and get back up on your feet.

    But it doesn’t – and it won’t and never will.

    The sun continues to rise on the mornings that feel uninhabitable. The bills must continue to be paid on time, the strangers you pass on the street will continue to have their birthdays, their first kisses and last goodbyes- their lives will continue on, completely unaware that everything inside you have rearranged itself into something sharp and recognizable.

    There is no great cosmic stillness reserved for your sorrows, there is only life pulsing and continuing forward, as thoughtlessly as the steady flow of blood through our veins — constant, unrelenting, and purposeful. Even when we’re wounded, even when the heart aches or the mind feels overwhelmed, the blood doesn’t stop its course. It pulses forward, carrying oxygen to every cell, quietly doing its work, regardless of chaos or calm.

    And you, battered and broken, are somehow expected to keep moving too. You can try to hold still, to dig your heels into the soil of memory and refuse to be dragged forward, to replay the past again and again until the pain is transformed to feeling holy in familiarity.

    You can try to live there, inside everything that’s lost, convincing yourself that if you remain here long enough, life will notice your insistence and circle back to you.

    But it won’t.

    It will continue to slip past you, faster and faster – as will the entire days and weeks of your life that you don’t even realise are passing until you look back and see the blur, until you get asked ‘what day is it?’ and you are clueless. The longer you stay paralyzed in your pain, the harder it becomes to remember how to step back into the current without drowning.

    It is brutal thing to come to terms with and accept, yes, but it is also, somehow, a doorway. Because as much as it hurts to know that life does not stop for our sorrows, it is also the only reason any of us survive it.

    If time truly paused for every heartbreak, if the world truly honoured every loss by falling silent and still – we would never get unstuck, we would remain paralysed for eternity. We would never be able to leave the broken places behind us, we would never arrive to the mornings where the weight feels lighter and the laughter comes easier, where hope finally begins to stir again in our chests.

    Life’s refusal to stop for our pain is not a punishment – It is the mechanism of our healing.

    It doesn’t ask you to be ready, it doesn’t demand for you to be okay – it simply carries you forward, inch by inch, day by day, month by month – year by year. Until one day you wake up and come to realize you are not quite the same person who broke apart all those lifetimes ago. You are something new, unlikely something softer, but something stronger, wiser; someone who is shaped by their losses rather than defined by them.

    Resilience isn’t about waiting for life to stop throwing situations your way, life is consistent, it doesn’t stop for anyone. Resilience is about realising that problems don’t get to have ownership over you. You have survived 100% of your life up till now – every breakdown, every bill, every setback, every heartbreak, every inconvenience, every stressful moment – everything you convinced yourself you couldn’t survive, you have survived still. So, what makes you think this is the problem that is going to take you out?

    So yes, grieve, fall apart, feel everything – every jagged, searing impossible thing, because what you feel matters and deserve to be honoured. Mourn the version of your life that didn’t survive. Mourn the dreams you had to give up on. Mourn the people who are not coming back. But do not confuse mourning with living – do not build a permanent home in your grief.

    Because the truth simply is – the living is still continuing all around you, even when you cannot yet feel it pulsing under your skin. Just as our circulatory system adapts to injury, redirecting flow and healing from within, life, too, finds ways to keep moving. A setback isn’t a full stop; it’s a momentary clot, not a collapse. The body teaches us resilience — that motion continues, that healing is embedded in movement, and that stagnation is not our nature. We are built to endure, to adjust, and most importantly, to keep going.

    ‘Life goes on’ is not a dismissal of your pain, it is not a careless shrug at the things you have lost, and it is most definitely not a demand to hurry up and heal faster. We are humans, our sole purpose is to feel everything and anything. It is merely a promise that the story is not over, that you are not over. Life continues on because it carries you forward to become someone you have not yet met. And someday, maybe not today or anytime soon, you will meet that version of yourself who realizes you survived something that you had thought would destroy you.

    So, when the weight is heavy and your thoughts are complex- what do you do? How do you get over it when you feel as though there is nothing else to do, that there is no solution – what do you do? when you are hurt, broken and burnt out, what can you do?

    These are questions that are needed to ask oneself, because there will come and be moments where you will have to find out. You will be at the lowest point in your life, and everything will be against you – what will you do – what CAN you do?

    Certain sufferings in our lives will leave when we have learned from them. But only when we have learned from them will they leave. We must take initiative to allow ourselves to try and find the messages in these sufferings, Of course, there will be times where it is going to be difficult, without a doubt. But other times you must find the writing on the wall; you have to be willing to look around and analyse what’s going on in order for you to possibly get away from the suffering that is surrounding you. Instead of expecting the world to pause, instead of living in this pain, you need to learn in order to keep out of suffering. That’s the solution to the problems that are excruciatingly big.

    Life goes on, and somehow

    So do we.