The Wound That Was Never Yours: On Bodies, Belonging, and the Colonial Logic We Inherited

I live in a body that the world reads in a way that doesn't match the fullness of what I carry.

For a long time, I thought that gap between how I'm perceived and what I know myself to hold was a personal failure. A branding problem. A failure to communicate clearly enough. If I could just find the right words, the right posture, the right credentials, the right performance of authenticity, maybe the world would finally see me correctly.

That's the trap.

Because that gap isn't a character flaw. It's a wound. And it was inflicted long before I arrived.

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The Logic We Inherited

Colonialism wasn't just a land grab. It was a logic. A way of organizing reality that told us certain things are natural, obvious, and immutable when they are in fact constructed, political, and designed to maintain power.

It taught us that bloodlines are pure. That identity is visible. That authenticity has a look.

Under this logic, a person is supposed to be immediately legible. You see them, and you know what they are. Their exterior broadcasts their interior. Their body is a label. Mixedness is a disruption. Multiplicity is suspect. Liminality is a problem to be solved rather than a truth to be honored.

None of this is true. But it got under my skin anyway, because that's exactly what it was designed to do.

Systems of erasure don't only operate through laws and borders. They operate through the daily, quiet demand that we make ourselves comprehensible to a gaze that was never meant to hold complexity. And when we can't—or won't—we are told, implicitly and explicitly, that the problem is us.

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The Performance of Authenticity

Here's what I've come to understand: When we require people to perform authenticity in a way that's immediately recognizable to us, we are not actually asking for truth. We are asking for a mirror of our own limited frameworks.

This shows up everywhere.

In workplaces that want "diverse perspectives" but only if they arrive in familiar packaging. In communities that celebrate heritage but only the version that photographs well. In leadership narratives that demand vulnerability but punish anything that doesn't fit the script. In the quiet pause before someone says, "But where are you really from?"

The exhaustion is not just emotional. It's cognitive. It's spiritual. It is the labor of constantly translating yourself into a language that was never designed to hold your syntax.

And here's the thing: That labor is stolen energy. Energy that could go into creation, into leadership, into love, into rest. Instead, it gets spent on survival.

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What the Wound Taught Me

I won't romanticize the wound. It shouldn't have happened. The fact that I've learned from it doesn't justify its existence. But I will say this:

Living in a body that gets misread has given me a particular kind of literacy.

I can sense the flattening before it happens. I recognize the moment when someone's complexity exceeds another person's capacity to hold it. I know the exact body language of someone who is performing belonging rather than experiencing it.

And as a leader, as a writer, as a human being trying to build spaces of actual integrity, that literacy is not nothing.

It has taught me to ask better questions:

Who am I subconsciously asking to shrink so I can understand them faster?

Whose fullness am I refusing to hold because it disrupts my neat categories?

What am I missing when I mistake legibility for truth?

These questions don't heal the original wound. But they do something important: They stop me from inflicting versions of it on others. And in a world that inherited the same logic I did, that's a form of leadership worth practicing.

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An Invitation

I'm writing this because I know I'm not alone in this particular exhaustion. If you, too, carry multitudes the world refuses to acknowledge, I want you to hear something:

Your fullness is not the problem. The flattening is.

You are not illegible. You are being read with the wrong instrument.

And the work; the deep, slow, generational work, is not proving your wholeness to a system trained to deny it. The work is refusing the flattening altogether. Building spaces where no one has to shrink their complexity to be seen. Learning to trust your own knowing when the world tells you you're mistaken about yourself.

The logic that wounded us is old. It is powerful. But it is not true. It was made. And what is made can be unmade.

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If this resonated, I invite you to share it with someone who needs to hear it. And if you're a leader holding unseen multitudes in your body, your lineage, your way of being, know that I see you. The work isn't easy. But we're doing it together.