The World Wasn’t Built For Someone Like Me 

Being a Queer, Transmasc, Black person with C-PTSD, it’s already hard enough to navigate spaces that weren’t configured for someone like me. Recently, I learned I’m also autistic with ADHD (AuDHD) with the added flavor profile of being 2e (Twice Exceptional). Being labeled “too much” while simultaneously being not enough for anyone, I’ve been trying to find somewhere I belong…

Since childhood, I’ve spent decades performing a version of myself that the world would be able to “tolerate”, shrinking myself for the benefit of others. I would over-explain myself when I was being misread, absorbing what everyone else couldn’t hold, and somehow thinking is what strength looks like. I thought the exhaustion came with the territory, and that feeling like a stranger, often times in places I thought was safe or called home, was normal. I didn’t realize how taxing and isolating it’s been for me until I finally did (even more) work on myself. 

Growing up on Linkin Park has been cathartic for me, where even to this day with their new music I feel seen, heard, understood, and even anchored. Their music, between even Chester and Emily, have always found my soul and embraced it. The more I listened to the lyrics over the decades, the more it made sense to me what they were teaching and telling me. And now, I want to share with you below in each section my journey using their songs and lyrics to help give it color and help you understand what it’s been like to be me. 

Lying From You — Linkin Park

“When I pretend everything is what I want it to be / I look exactly like what you had always wanted to see”

I knew that I was putting on a show most times, but I didn’t know that it was because I was masking. I never knew what that meant until I started to learn what it was as I went along my journey, picking up terms for others about themselves. I learned it late in life, but I’d been masking with everyone: my family on both sides, friends or really “friends”, and eventually my own discord server friend community. I’m sure from the outside I seemed put together, seamless even. Everyone who thought knew me would likely make it seem like I “had it”, or that I didn’t need any kind of help, opening me up to becoming “the fixer” majority of my life. I looked like what they wanted. The trap of high-functioning masking: I do it so well that nobody questions it, including myself. I thought that was just called being adaptable. I didn’t know I was stealing seconds from myself just to make other people comfortable.

“Stealing second after second just because I know I can”

Every second spent performing, absorbing, translating, holding space for others (especially when people don’t hold space for me), is a second stolen from my own experience. I was capable of the performance so I kept doing it (hence the high-functioning), but capability isn’t the same as sustainability. Just because I could doesn’t mean I should have had to. I built community, I thought, with my friend Discord server I created, friendships with people over the years, and spaces I thought were chosen family. I poured my heart, soul, tears, everything into holding those containers together. I was the one who showed up, who remembered, who held space, who translated everyone else’s emotional experience back to them in language they could understand. I did it all while quietly drowning in the weight of my own unprocessed experience.

Nobody asked if I was okay. Nobody had real capacity to hold space for me, and not the casual “virtual hug” or toxic positive “it’s going to be ok”. Real space for me to be me and be seen. I was performing fine so convincingly that fine became the only version of me anyone thought existed.

“The very worst part of you is me / This isn’t what I wanted to be”

Self-reckoning is hard work. The worst part of the masking wasn’t what it did to my relationships with people, but what it did to my relationship with myself. I internalized the performance so deeply that I became complicit in my own erasure. I was convincing myself that the exhaustion was strength, and that the isolation was independence. I even thought that not being seen was the same as being private or that maybe I was miscommunicating to other people.

When I finally stopped and started setting boundaries, naming patterns, and choosing myself, people left. People that I thought knew me or I thought were safe, abandoned me. For those that didn’t, I had to claw space between me and them. The war within is not without its causalities. 

“I never thought that what I said would have you running from me / Like this”

I never thought honesty and self-advocacy would be the thing that ended my relationships. I had not realized…the relationship was with the mask and not with me. The one that absorbed and held everything without ever asking for anything back. When I stopped being that person, it became very lonely, very fast. Being me cost me everything… 

Heavy — Linkin Park ft. Kiiara

“I don’t like my mind right now / Stacking up problems that are so unnecessary / Wish that I could slow things down”

I’ve dealt with depression all my life since childhood. When I was younger, I had more suicidal thoughts and tendencies that no one knew, or honestly paid attention to. I grew up carrying weight I didn’t have the vocabulary for to even tell people outside of my self-aware mental health conditions what I was going through. I had a childhood that required constant vigilance and hyperawareness of every mood shift in the people around me, even every unspoken expectation I was supposed to already know. I thought this was normal as I was made to believe it was. I thought this was just what being alive felt like.

“You say that I’m paranoid / But I’m pretty sure the world is out to get me / It’s not like I make the choice / To let my mind stay so fucking messy”

I can’t count how many times someone told me I was being too sensitive and/or too dramatic. “You need help.” “You need Jesus.” “You’re doing too much.” People would say this to me thinking that I was (trying to) making it harder than it needed to be. What I know now is that my nervous system was tracking everything, processing everything, and never getting a break from the input. I’m not paranoid; I’m just undiagnosed.  My AuDHD brain has always been trying to survive in a world that wasn’t designed for it. My neurology is not a character flaw, but rather a symptom nobody thought to look for. All because… I seemed so functional on the outside. 

The toxic friendships, family members, and people compounded it. People who took without giving, who used my capacity as a resource and called it love, and spaces that felt like home until they didn’t. Even at one of my jobs there was a traumatic disaster of a situation involving South Korea, that I won’t get into fully here, broke something inside me that I’d been holding together with sheer willpower for years. My nervous system finally said, “ENOUGH!”

“I’m holding on / Why is everything so heavy? / Holding on / To so much more than I can carry / I keep dragging around what’s bringing me down / If I just let go, I’d be set free”

The cruelest part of carrying around the weight on your shoulders is doing it without knowing why. You can’t put it down because you don’t know what it is; You just keep dragging it. You tell yourself everyone carries this much, and that this is what it means to be strong. You tell yourself convincingly that letting go would mean failing not only people around you but yourself. What I didn’t know was that the weight wasn’t mine to carry in the first place in addition to other people’s. Some of it was a nervous system in chronic overdrive where my body was keeping the score. Some of it was grief for a version of myself I never got to be because nobody knew to look for me, the real me. Letting go of the weight, of the people, and of the version of myself I was performing has been the most liberating and loving thing I’ve ever done for myself.

Two-Faced — Linkin Park

“Last time, I was hanging by a thread / Tryna say I’m not, but I’m in it over my head / That’s when I figured out where it led / Beginning to realize that you put me over the edge”

• Family physical, mental, and emotional abuse across childhood
• Being displaced after Grandma’s death with nowhere really to land, because mom wanted me out
• A workplace disaster in South Korea that broke something already held together by sheer will
• Building an entire community (in discord and offline) from scratch, carrying it alone, and then watching it collapse under the weight of people who couldn’t hold it (and didn’t want to)
• When my CPTSD response hit in a room full of people who stayed silent and instead cross-examined me

Retrospective clarity: I didn’t see it happening in real time because I was too busy surviving. 

“Last time, you told me it wasn’t true / And pointing every finger at things that you didn’t do / So that’s why I kept missing the clues / And never realized that the one that did it was you”

• A “friend” who misgendered and deadnamed me repeatedly after I came out, including at her own birthday party, while steadily performing allyship publicly
• A “friend” who used my vulnerability as a resource, extracted labor and career help, and then disappeared when stability arrived
• A “friend” who turned her wedding into a transaction and called my boundaries a bomb or “personal issues”, then accused me of making myself the victim for having feelings
• A “friend” who rewrote every conflict to center their own pain while mine became collateral damage
• A “friend” or two whose covert patterns included calling me names in private, while presenting as reasonable in public
• Parents whose emotional immaturity meant my pain was always reframed as my fault or my problem to manage

I missed the clues for so long because the people causing harm were convincing me the harm wasn’t happening, or that I was causing it.

“Your truth’s not rigid, your rules aren’t fair / The dark’s too vivid, the light’s not there / I start to give in, but I can’t bear / To put it all behind, I run into it blind like”

• People who chose conflict avoidance over my protection, especially those who were present when something threatened my safety and said nothing
• Christian indoctrination used as a cage between family and “friends”, saying “you need Jesus” as a form of control and shame
• Apolitical people who called their silence neutrality while I absorbed the cost of their comfort
• “Friends” that won’t stick up for me when the person causing the harm is given pass after pass
• People who couldn’t hold my identity (my queerness, being transmasc, even my neurodivergence before the diagnosis) and called their failure my intensity

Repeatedly trusting these structures and people before understanding they weren’t built nor designed to include me, because their truth was flexible enough to accommodate their comfort but never mine.

“You should have recognized / It’s too late for choosing sides / Two-faced, caught in the middle”

• The ones who made my connection to them conditional and based on how useful I could be, even so leveraging me as “The Fixer” most cases
• Abusive limerence from people who wanted to possess rather than know me: who followed, watched, circled, blocked and unblocked as a form of control
• The ones who sexualized me consistently and called it admiration, reducing me to a body and a function rather than a person
• The ones who made me a background character in my own story, present enough to extract, but absent when I needed to be centered
• The surveillance watchers: people who have some access left and use it to monitor my trajectory, measure my success against their own stagnation, and stay adjacent to something they chose to leave
• The ones who will read this and recognize themselves instantly, this is for you especially

To the people who played both sides, who wanted access to me while keeping their distance, who performed friendship while extracting from me, and who surveilled from the outside after choosing to leave me, fuck off.

Somewhere I Belong — Linkin Park

“I wanna heal, I wanna feel / What I thought was never real / I wanna let go of the pain I’ve held so long / Erase all the pain ’til it’s gone”

In September 2026, I sat with a psychologist named Jennifer for my autistic assessments. She told me I was remarkable, and even enjoyed our conversations and discussions, noting that I’ve done a lot of the work. She confirmed what I had been building language for my entire life that I am Autistic, that I have ADHD, and now further that I am twice exceptional (2e). It made sense the complexities I carried between being picked for a magnet school, being labeled gifted as a child, yet still having struggles that masking heavily hid. It felt like a sigh of relief, and also a new uncharted territory to explore. I only imagined what life would have been like if my parents did care about me in order to get me diagnosed. I suspect if care and emotional maturity were a factor that they would have placed my brother in therapy instead of martial arts for his violence and anger management issues; And I would have gotten the support and help I needed, hopefully without it being conditional. 

“I will never know myself until I do this on my own / And I will never feel anything else until my wounds are healed / I will never be anything ’til I break away from me / I will break away, I’ll find myself today”

I did this on my own. Before anyone handed me a framework, a diagnosis, or a permission slip to be exactly who I am, I built the map myself out of therapy, out of grief, out of pattern recognition, and out of Linkin Park albums at 2 AM. I finally decided that the cost of performing for people who would never fully see me was too high.

Breaking away from the version of myself I performed for everyone else’s comfort was the hardest thing I have ever done. It cost me friendships, family connections, communities I built with my own hands. It cost me the illusion that if I just held on long enough, people would eventually show up the way I needed them to.

And when they didn’t… I survived it.

I am still here, still healing, and still finding out what it feels like to take up space without apology. I’m finally letting my brain work the way it actually works, and stopping myself from mistaking endurance for strength and exhaustion for love. I don’t know yet what belonging fully looks like, or who I can find community now with. But for the first time in my life, I’m not performing to find out; I’m looking for “Somewhere I Belong” ❤️‍🩹❤️‍🔥