Identity
There has been a contradiction in my life for years, and I have only recently started articulating it clearly. I have led communities before . I have been part of founding teams. I have worked inside startups. I repeatedly find myself in environments where leadership, impact are either finds me or is quietly handed to me. yet despite this pattern, I do not think of myself as someone who loves leadership. In fact, if I am honest, I have often avoided it.
There is something interesting about a certain kind of people. they are flexible in a way that makes them difficult to categorize. as if they were not built to fit into a single rule, a single system, or a single identity. I still cannot give them a perfect name, because they blend too many traits at once. they are curious, exploratory, internally alive, purposeful, often generalists, and deeply adaptive. they are not built for a narrow lane. they are built for terrain.
It started with a friend (North) asking me a simple question about how I form relationships. something I had never stopped and wondered about. that led to me doing some introspection, and I wrote this at the time: Adding New Friends Systems .
This month I have been seeking advice from people I trust about how to handle relationships in my life. there are a few relationships I deeply care about and genuinely want to preserve. but the majority of the tension I face comes from relationships I never consciously chose. they simply happened. I would find someone assuming we were friends, while I had never said so .
We carry this thought in the back of our heads. it is subtle. it is subconscious. it is so invisible that even when you write and write, trying to drag it from the subconscious into the conscious, it refuses to show itself clearly. instead, you only feel the symptoms, the void, the emptiness, the sense of being lost. but beneath all of that, there is something deeply rooted.
I remember that over the years a kind of resistance began to form between me and giving advice to others. at first I thought it was because they were too lost to see . sometimes I thought they were not ready to heal . but the truth is simpler and harder to admit. the resistance existed because I was different.
I have learned something recently that I can finally say without arrogance. when you are naturally good at enduring something, you underestimate how heavy it feels for others. there is a friction that happens when your strength becomes someone else’s weakness. and instead of recognizing that difference, I was projecting my own structure onto them.