on the quiet machinery beneath my skin

there’s a particular dissonance in realising that most people navigate you the way they navigate unfamiliar art- not to understand, but to categorise, as if the point of a face is to satisfy some internal filing system. i’ve watched it happen with a kind of detached curiosity, the way one watches strangers misinterpret a painting: bold certainties built on details they barely glanced at. apparently my expression suggests a vacancy of emotion, a metallic kind of stillness, the implication of danger lingering in the edges. and what’s strange is not that they’re wrong, but how confidently they insist they’re right.

lately i’ve started to suspect that people aren’t responding to me at all, but to the silhouette their minds project onto any surface that doesn’t immediately surrender its meaning. it’s astonishing how quickly a lack of visible softness becomes synonymous with cruelty, how silence is mistaken for void, how composure is rewritten as something reptilian. sometimes i wonder whether i’m the one mis-seeing them, and that realization unsettles me more than their assumptions ever could.

the truth, or whatever approximation of truth i’ve managed to gather, is that they’re not really perceiving; they’re guessing. and they’re guessing with the arrogance of people who believe their intuition is a divine gift instead of a tired shortcut. i’ve become a canvas for their unresolved narratives, an empty room they populate with ghosts of their own making. someone once told me i look like the kind of girl who might disappear into the night after doing something unspeakable, and the absurd part is that they said it like a compliment, as if mystery is valuable only when it is menacing.

and here’s the twisted realization that arrives uninvited, slicing the thought clean in half: maybe i’ve allowed this to happen because being misread feels safer than being known. there’s a certain comfort in opacity; people can’t wound what they can’t locate. i used to think misunderstanding was a kind of violence; now i’m not sure it isn’t a kind of shield.

but the cost is strange, quiet, cumulative. it’s the sensation of hearing someone describe your reflection in a mirror you’ve never looked into, the cognitive dissonance of recognising none of the traits but all of the implications. it makes you wonder whether identity is something you possess or something constantly being negotiated between your interior world and everyone else’s projections. i don’t like the answer that follows that thought, but it arrives anyway.

the surreal part is this: i feel like i’m watching myself from outside, taking notes the way scholars annotate obscure manuscripts. the margins of my mind are filled with footnotes explaining why certain emotions were redacted, why softness was encrypted, why vulnerability had to be stored in a locked drawer, not because it was weak, but because it was precious.

love, in this context, becomes almost theoretical and improbable event requiring someone who resists the instinct to oversimplify. someone who looks long enough to realise that the supposed sharpness is just density, the silence is just calibration, the stillness is a kind of listening. i imagine such a person sometimes, not with hope but with a detached curiosity, the same way scientists imagine undiscovered species. quietly. methodically. knowing the world rarely produces creatures like that.

still, there’s a peculiar comfort in believing they exist, people who read not the surface but the fracture lines, who can tell by the tilt of a sentence where the breath caught, who understand that the most revealing thing about someone is often what they don’t bother to defend. the kind of person who would look at me and, instead of crafting a myth, simply say they can tell I’m alive.

and maybe that’s the twisted, intellectual centre of all this: i’m less concerned with being loved and more fascinated by whether anyone will ever notice the contradiction i’ve become, the softness mistaken for threat, the warmth mistaken for distance, the depth mistaken for a warning sign. i’m not afraid of being unreadable; I’m scared no one will try reading at all.

p.s. i want to take a moment to explain the title because it took me forever to settle on it. “on the quiet machinery beneath my skin” is basically me trying to name all the inner stuff that shapes me- the thoughts, instincts, patterns, little realizations that happen quietly inside before anything shows on the surface. it’s like the unseen gears that make me me: the intuition, the small emotional calculations, the private awakenings. it’s not about being dramatic or intense; it’s more about noticing myself, being self-aware. the things that guide me, the ways i observe and reconstruct things, the way my mind moves, it’s all happening under the skin, and most people never see it, but that’s okay. this is just me acknowledging it. sending love anss