Understanding ≠ Agreement

Notes from a Life Built on Others Over Self

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🏴‍☠️→Prologue←🏴‍☠️

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Understanding you does not mean that I agree with you. That is the rulebook I learned to read people by.

For twenty years I followed a single command: others over self. The rest unfolded inevitably: be invisible, be useful, be replaceable. That blueprint saved me and later estranged me. The architecture of my life was built on misunderstanding. Always blend in. Always complete the mission. You are replaceable. You are not more valuable than the task.

For most of my life, energy was something I spent without hesitation. If the mission demanded it, I gave it. If someone else’s life depended on it, I risked mine. The logic was simple. That was my family’s legacy, my personal code, the foundation that kept me in uniform until the day I retired.

But here’s the truth no one tells me: that reservoir is not bottomless. It doesn’t refill just because the uniform comes off. Decades of pouring everything outward leaves scars that don’t heal by themselves. Now, every day I feel the limits of what’s left. My energy is finite, and pretending otherwise is a lie that would burn me down.

That is why I live by triage. The same way a medic looks at a battlefield and decides who can be saved, who must wait, and who is already gone, I apply the same cold math to my worries. Not every opinion deserves attention. Not every grievance earns my outrage. Not every fight is mine to take on. People mistake this restraint for indifference, but it is nothing of the sort. It is survival.

When someone tells me their truth or their opinion, I listen. I can understand them, perfectly. But that doesn’t mean I agree. And it doesn’t mean I will spend my limited energy carrying their weight for them. My care is not absent, it is focused. My empathy is not infinite, it is measured. I save it for the people and problems that matter on a scale worthy of what little fuel I still have to burn.

This triage of worries is not coldness. It is discipline born of exhaustion. It is the only way to preserve enough of myself for the few, if any, who truly matter.

Triage isn’t just something I invented for myself. It’s a mindset with deep roots across philosophy, psychology, and the craft I lived by.

Camus taught me that rebellion means refusing illusions. To waste energy on every small fire is to be consumed by absurdity itself. The Stoics said it another way: do not spend yourself on what you cannot control. My triage is both. It is not apathy, it is clarity.

What most people call “masking” I lived as adaptation. Every role demanded a version of me tailored to the environment. Over the years, that adaptation became automatic. The problem is that people confuse adaptability with dishonesty. In truth, the mask was always in service of others. Now, the triage system prevents those masks from eating what little I have left.

My years in HUMINT was built on understanding without agreement. To get what you needed, you stepped into the world of another, saw through their motives, and never let their truth become yours. That required empathy without surrender. I still live by that code, only now the “missions” are daily life. My triage is the same skill sharpened for a different battlefield.

All of this feeds the same paradox: I care more deeply than most, but I show it less. My triage looks like indifference to outsiders, when in truth it is the only way to preserve what matters. Misunderstanding has always been my camouflage. Now it is also my shield.

Here is the cost: a life built on misunderstanding does not stop being misunderstood once the uniform is gone. People still misread me. They see restraint and call it cold. They see quiet and call it distance. They see triage and call it indifference. What they never see is the math behind it: the energy already spent, the lifetimes already lived, the weight already carried.

The irony is that my driving code has always been others over self. I risked everything because I cared too much, not because I cared too little. I gave so much of myself away that I’ve learned to ration what was left. That rationing looks like detachment to the untrained eye. It looks like silence, or masks, or indifference. In truth, it is the only way I can still care at all.

Misunderstanding has become my constant companion. It shielded me when I needed to be invisible. It made me effective when I needed to survive. But now, it builds walls where I wish there were windows. My masks became habits. My habits became my identity. And so the very skill that made me effective has also made me unknowable.

This is the paradox I live in: misunderstood because I care too deeply, mistaken for cold because my fire was spent on others, unseen because I learned too well how to disappear. The fortress I built to protect myself has also kept others out.

I cannot rebuild the years already spent. The fire I gave away is gone. What remains is the choice of how to spend what little fuel I have left. That is where my quiet rebellion begins.

I will not waste myself on counterfeit weight. I will not let every pebble become a mountain. My triage is not selfishness, it is survival. It is also my way of honoring the same code I lived by: others over self. Only now, the “others” I choose are fewer, sharper, truer.

If you mistake that for indifference, so be it. Few, if any, will ever understand me completely. But those who do, will see the truth: I am not empty. I am disciplined. I am not cold. I am conserving heat for the people and problems that matter most.

Understanding me does not mean you will agree with me. But it does mean you’ll see me clearly. And if that clarity costs me being misunderstood by the rest of the world, I can live with that.

Switzerland (2016)

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🏴‍☠️→Essay←🏴‍☠️

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Few, If Any

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What if the deepest joy isn’t in being understood, but in knowing yourself well enough that misunderstanding no longer wounds you? I keep circling this thought because it’s one I haven’t reconciled fully.

Few, if any, will ever understand me. Not just as a whole but in my motivations, my trials, my triumphs, my depths, and my love for others.

Maybe it’s a quiet admission of exile I naively didn’t see coming or just a fleeting attempt to make sense of it.

It is most certainly not a passing sadness, the kind I can walk off or drown out in noise. It’s a structural truth, an architecture of existence that forces me to stand apart, even when I’d rather blend in. It carries with it both an ache and a strange pride. The ache of knowing no one will ever fully map the terrain of my inner world, and the pride that I’ve built a world vast enough to be unmappable.

This is the paradox of the line: it both wounds and affirms. To be misunderstood means isolation. To be too complex to be understood means I’ve lived deeply enough that simplicity no longer applies.

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The Cost of Solitude

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We all crave to be seen, mirrored, understood. Psychology says it’s built into us: the infant’s eyes searching for the parent’s gaze, the adult still reaching for a reflection that proves we’re real. But the further I walk from the easy path, the more fractured that mirror becomes. People can grasp fragments of me, never the whole.

Motivations get misread. Trials are ignored or cheapened. Triumphs are dismissed as arrogance. Even love, especially love, goes unseen when it doesn’t fit the categories others understand.

There’s grief in that. A loneliness that feels like it will never lift.

It is the loneliness of speaking a language only I understand. I try to translate it, to hand pieces of myself over in words, actions, gestures. But most people don’t have the vocabulary to receive it. They want simple answers, clean motives, tidy categories. And when I refuse to cut myself down into those pieces they call me distant, difficult or broken.

What they don’t see is that the fracture isn’t in me, it’s in the world that cannot hold me whole.

My mistake was thinking the labels and dismissals were about me. The truth is, they were misplaced, because most of those I’ve met could not comprehend the cost of what I carry. Even some who wore the uniform, even those who flaunt their patriotic signals of virtue and understanding. The cost of being both scarred and intellectual is this: people mistake the stillness I carry for peace, when in truth chaos still holds the reins.

That grief doesn’t pass quickly. It has become a kind of shadow I carry, a constant reminder that most mirrors are too small to reflect the truth of who I am.

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The Quiet Liberation

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And yet, hidden inside that grief is a strange liberation. If few, if any, will ever understand me, then I am free to stop performing. Free to stop explaining myself to people who wouldn’t understand even if I gave them the clearest blueprint.

The liberation is brutal: it tells me no one is coming to carry my contradictions for me. But once I stop waiting, I can finally carry them myself.

Camus called this the absurd, the fracture between our hunger for meaning and the silence of the world. His answer wasn’t despair. It was revolt. To live anyway. To shoulder my contradictions and walk on, even smiling at the futility of it.

My attempts to explain my scars to people, not for sympathy, but for understanding have fallen on too many deaf ears. My blind allegiance to a brotherhood, a falsehood in disguise, forced me to let go of a tribe I once called home. To be made a nomad again, not of choice, but of fate. This pain and grief opened my chest wide to an indifferent world, one that will never see me whole again.

This is the kind of freedom that feels more like a blade than a gift. It cuts away illusions I once leaned on: that someone would eventually understand, that there was a person out there who could hold every piece of me without dropping any. When those illusions are gone, what’s left is heavy, but it’s also real.

Living without the hope of being understood leaves you exposed, but it also makes you untouchable. There’s nothing left for others to misinterpret or betray because you no longer depend on them for recognition. You’ve stopped handing out the map to your soul and started walking the terrain alone.

It’s liberation that doesn’t look like freedom from the outside. To others, it may look like withdrawal, detachment, even bitterness. But on the inside, it’s the first breath of oxygen after years of suffocation.

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A Collision With the World

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In a culture addicted to easy labels and consumable identities, insisting on the fullness of my own complexity is a rebellion. The herd wants reduction. They want me flattened into something they can recognize: veteran, writer, father, friend, broken, healed, useful, expendable.

But the fragments they see are theirs. The whole remains mine.

That’s the collision point. And it’s not gentle. To be whole in a fragmented world means I will be misunderstood, called names, even cast out. I’ve been accused of arrogance, aloofness, even narcissism, because I refuse to play the part. But what they call arrogance is really clarity. What they call aloofness is solitude. What they call narcissism is simply refusing to apologize for depth.

The world resents what it cannot categorize. And when I stand as proof that a human being cannot be simplified, the response is often hostility. They mock what they cannot grasp, and attack what refuses to bow. This isn’t just social friction, it’s survival instinct turned against me. Groups protect their illusions, and anyone who threatens to expose them is treated like a contagion.

I stepped away from the box only to see there was never a box in the first place. It was a trap, a social illusion that demanded I stay humble and quiet while being placed in a cell not of my making. I was told to forget horrors, to bury pain that chases men to their own gallows. I was shown that my will to live had been built on false contradictions. That’s a harsh reality to wake up to. I may be labeled, stereotyped, treated as an outcast… but I live. And that is my rebellion against the absurd judgments of those who have never seen death in a way that changes a man.

This is where exile hardens into identity. To endure being misunderstood without collapsing into the role others assign me is its own kind of defiance. It is costly, but it is also proof that I’m still whole.

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Joy Without a Mirror

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The joy isn’t in finally being understood. The joy is in carrying the fire of self knowledge even when no one else can hold it with me. It’s in loving even when my love goes unseen. In enduring my trials without the comfort of an audience.

It’s not an easy joy. It’s not warm or reassuring. It’s the kind of joy I only found after grief burned through the illusions. A joy that doesn’t depend on mirrors or applause.

It felt almost cruel at first, that joy could survive in such barren soil. But that’s the secret: it doesn’t just survive there, it grows stronger. My joy without recognition is unshakable, because no one can grant it and no one can take it away. It isn’t dependent on applause, understanding, or approval. It’s built on something deeper: the stubborn clarity that I exist, I endure, and I carry meaning even when no one else sees it.

This kind of joy doesn’t glitter. It doesn’t attract crowds. It’s quiet, heavy, almost defiant. It belongs to me because I’ve stared at my own reflection and refused to look away. It belongs to me because I’ve carried my scars without dressing them up for sympathy. It belongs to me because I’ve realized the world will never give me my worth and I’ve decided to live anyway.

My joy is deeply rooted in family, in raising those I can’t live without, so they can one day live without me. In loving a woman so much that there’s little left for me to give myself. My joy is in reading the words of men and women who refuse simple answers, whose search for knowledge leads to discoveries that can change a soul. Above all else, I find joy in the chance to live in a way that honors those who are no longer here. To find joy, and to choose it, despite the horrors this world has brought me.

So let the world misunderstand. Let them reduce, label, dismiss.

The fragments they see are theirs. The whole remains mine.

And in that, there is a joy no crowd can take away.