We use this cheap, hyper-recycled paper at work. It's got a dirty brown hue to it, slightly rough to the touch. Environmentally sound. Cost-effective. Everyone seems fine with it.
I mentioned once that it sends a message. That when someone who's already struggling, already dealing with challenges most of us can't imagine, receives a letter from us on paper that looks like it's been salvaged from a skip, it tells them something. That they're not worth real paper. That we're doing the minimum, not actually giving a shit.
No one knew what I was talking about.
I've spent most of my life noticing things other people don't notice. Or caring about things other people don't care about. I'm not entirely sure which it is — whether I see things they genuinely miss, or whether I see the same things but they just don't register them as important. Either way, the outcome's the same. I'm operating on a frequency no one else seems to be tuned to.
I clocked it early. Primary school, maybe. I wasn't like everyone else and that singled me out for some bullying. But more than that, I figured out quickly that school was a bullshit system. They weren't teaching us. We weren't learning. It was all just a construct around some criteria we needed to regurgitate in a one-hour exam at the end of Year 11. The whole thing felt like performance, not education.
My parents watched a lot of soaps. Coronation Street, mainly. There was this family — Kevin, Sally, and their two daughters. Kevin was a mechanic with his own garage on the street. Sally worked in the factory a three-minute walk from home. It was presented as the ideal young family. Stable. Ordinary. Safe.
And even as a kid, I found it desperately boring. Not the show — the life. It was so small. So ordinary. So limited in scope and ambition. I couldn't understand why anyone would want that. Why anyone would settle for something so contained.
I think I'm intelligent, but that's not really the thing. It's more that I'm curious. I want to learn and understand things. I want to figure stuff out. I want things to matter. I don't like doing things for the sake of them — I think about why I'm doing something, who or what it's for, whether it actually serves a purpose. And I want it to be the best. Not perfect, but the best I can do. The best it can be.
Most people don't seem to operate this way. At work, I'm surrounded by people who want to do the bare minimum. Clock in, tick boxes, clock out. And sometimes — quite often, actually — I'm envious of them. Of people who can just do the bare minimum, who don't think beyond the surface, who don't have so much emotion and energy wrapped up in everything.
Because I'm aware of everything. All the time. Body language, tone shifts, subtext, patterns, what's being said and what's being left unsaid. Systems and how they function. The gap between what something claims to be and what it actually is.
It's fucking exhausting.
Too many times I've been mid-conversation and thought, did you see that — and no one else did. People will ask questions about what just happened and no one else seems to have been paying attention. They were in the same room, watching the same interaction, and somehow they missed it entirely.
I tried to switch it off. Started young. I was being sent home from primary school for being drunk. Dissolved into drugs later. Cut myself so my focus would be one hundred per cent on the stinging pain instead of everything else — giving me something concrete to focus on.
Anything to not exist as I am. Anything to turn down the volume.
It didn't work. Not in any sustained way. You can numb it temporarily but it comes back. The hyperawareness. The caring about things that don't seem to matter to anyone else.
At some point — I don't know if it was a specific moment or a gradual withdrawal — I stopped participating. Stopped trying for meaningful connection. It was a combination of things. Not feeling like I mattered to anyone. Not being able to connect with people on any meaningful level. The connections I thought were there turning out to be something else — me projecting meaning onto people who were just being decent. So I withdrew. Became content, or at least adapted, to my own company.
I'm not a lonely person. I'm an extrovert — I like being around people, I enjoy company. But I'm also perfectly capable of being alone. I don't need others to function. I don't mind eating out alone, going to the cinema alone. I exist on my own frequency and I've made peace with that. The social connections I have are fine, pleasant even. But they don't go deep. They can't.
But I can't actually withdraw completely. I have to work. I have to exist in contexts with other people. And that's where the disconnection really lands — being surrounded by people who don't see what I see, don't care about what I care about.
That's the fucked-up part. I still give a shit. I still think about who things are for, how they're perceived, what message they send. At work, when we need people to attend something, ninety-nine per cent of people will send a message: don't forget you signed up to this, you need to be at this place by this time.
I'll give details. Consider what they already know and don't know. Include a map. Explain what we're going to be doing, what they need or don't need to bring. End with we're looking forward to seeing you there.
It's not complicated. It's maybe ten or twenty per cent more effort. But it transforms something from done to good. From functional to considered. And no one else bothers.
I guess deep down, I know a lot of this is probably projection. This is how I would want to be considered. What I need to feel valued and cared for. So it's important to me to do these things for other people, to care about the outcome, to make sure it's the best it can be.
And that sounds noble, maybe. But it's exhausting. It's a weight I can't put down. If there was some kind of surgery to make it stop, I would sign up in a heartbeat.
I can explain why something's important. Why it's worthwhile doing properly. But I can't make people see it. I can't make them care about the outcome. And I don't translate myself anymore because my perception is that people don't care, so what's the point?
I think — and I realise there's probably some recency bias here — I've only ever met one person who's been vaguely on my wavelength. Who sees things the way I see them. Who cares about things mattering in the same way.
And it's not been going well.
It's been stressful. Destabilising. Confusing. Exhausting. I've had all these feelings of rejection and neglect on loop for weeks. It feels genuinely unsafe. Dangerous.
Because here's the thing: we're on the same wavelength. We see the world the same way. But that doesn't mean we see each other in the same way.
Being understood doesn't guarantee being cared about. And somehow that's worse.
When someone gets it — truly gets a sense of how you operate, sees the world through a similar lens, understands why things matter — and they still don't care enough, what does that confirm except what you've always suspected? That even when someone finally sees you, you're still not worth it.
I think I'm damaged from childhood. Broken from life. And the care asymmetry is always there. But maybe partially it's because I need any care directed towards me to be big and loud. To overpower the foundational sense in myself that I don't matter. If I could be normal — if I could care less, see less, feel less — maybe I could be okay with less care. Maybe it would be less important.
But I can't be normal. I've tried. I've tried to blend in, to not show it, to operate on their frequency instead of mine. But a key component of how I'm built is wanting authenticity and having deep emotions about everything. So it's pointless.
I just am this way. Seeing everything. Caring about everything. Exhausted by it. Isolated by it. Unable to switch it off or dial it down or find anyone else who exists in the same space.
And the one person who seemed to? Who actually operated on the same wavelength?
That just confirmed what I already knew. That being different doesn't make you special. It just makes you alone.