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This realization came to me at twenty one, and it was not gentle. it hurt to admit. I come from a spectrum of people who were never fully able to see others clearly , but I was not one of them. I was always good at analyzing people. I understood patterns, motives, insecurities. I even played the therapist role many times in my life, something I wrote about briefly here . understanding people was not magic. it is a basic human feature if you pay enough attention. the contradiction that confused me for years was this: I could understand almost everyone, yet I struggled to truly connect with them.

I basically ruined all the friendships I had since I was a kid, and it is me who is the problem, not the people, although I kept myself busy to the point where I don’t feel it most of the time, alongside guilt and fear of making new friendships.

The story goes back to 2023 when I was a student at the University of Khartoum. I wrote about that period before in a draft called days that I still do not understand . during that time, I was packed with fear. I was shaking for no obvious reason, living inside something I could not explain. I kept saying it was my sympathetic nervous system reacting because I was grinding too hard, as if my body had decided to pull the emergency brake for me. but that explanation slowly started to feel shallow. what triggered my nervous system in the first place? why was I already tense before the collapse? why was I restless long before everything fell apart?

This question is by far the hardest for me to answer. I’ve tried for years, and every attempt was prone to failure. A big part of the struggle wasn’t just about identity itself, but about how strange my relationships were, unstable, confusing, always shifting. It’s hard to know who you are when the people around you don’t stay long enough , for you to see your reflection in them.