A new paradigm, I think my brain just levelled up

There are moments that don’t arrive with fireworks, just a quiet and unmistakable click. A thought lands, a truth reveals itself, and the landscape of my mind subtly rearranges.

I didn’t gain anything outwardly impressive. No title. No prize. Just a sudden, clear self-awareness that felt like levelling up. Quietly. Deeply. Internally.

For most of my life, I’ve felt like an outsider. Too intense. Too much. Too different. I noticed things, sensed shifts, read people in ways others didn’t seem to see. I assumed that meant something was wrong with me, that I was not built the right way. Maybe I was thinking in different ways to others.

It didn’t come with ego. It came with calm. A whole new way of seeing opened up and I realised that maybe I was never broken. I was just tuned in to something others hadn’t recognised yet. It felt like watching someone get excited about discovering a door, while I’ve been quietly leaning against it my whole life.

With that realisation came relief also, grief. Grief for all the years I spent shrinking myself. Grief for the energy I used trying to fit into spaces that were never meant for me.

There’s joy too. And something that feels like quiet validation. I even feel a sense of forgiveness, for myself and for the people who couldn’t see what I needed them to. I don’t feel the urge to prove anything now. I don’t need to say, “I told you so.” The shift happened inside me, and that’s where it matters most.

And then, like life often does, it tested me.

I know that it will not take long for a familiar voice to echo back, uninvited. A replayed commentary from someone I always tried to please or prove myself too. One moment proud of me, the next brushing me off as “inappropriate”. I heard again the words said about me and around me. Words that, at the time, I knew were not congruent with what I had believed based on the information I had at the time, to embody the behaviours required to be valued, but didn’t know how to articulate it. And in a few moments, it all came flooding back.

The loop. The lesson I keep meeting from new angles. Growth is not a straight line. It is more like a spiral. I keep circling the same truths until I am ready to live them differently.

Portia Nelson’s poem There’s a Hole in My Sidewalk captures this so well. The repeated mistakes. The moments of awareness. The slow, stubborn movement toward something better. We all fall in. Pretend not to notice. Get stuck. Try again. Until one day, we finally walk a different path.

That is where I am now. Pulling myself out of the old narrative, not good enough.