Perception Is a Bitch

Day 136 – April 8, 2026

Perception is amazing. And a bitch. Both things are true.

It shapes everything. What people think they see. What they miss. What they project. What they decide about you before you’ve even finished your first sentence. What you decide about yourself when you catch your reflection at the wrong angle, in the wrong light, with the wrong mood wrapped around your body like a second outfit.

Perception is power. Perception is distortion. Perception is theater with consequences.

I’ve been thinking about that all day About how everyone sees a different version of me.

Some people see confidence. Some see softness. Some see beauty. Some see a question they think they already know the answer to, which is always cute because that type is usually wrong and so very committed to the bit.

And then there’s me.

Trying to make sense of all the lenses at once while also carrying the most intimate knowledge of what I’ve lived through. Because that’s the weird part, isn’t it? The world gets its version of you. You get the interior version. And they are not always in agreement.

Sometimes the world sees strength while I feel exhaustion. Sometimes the world sees beauty while I’m still trying to make peace with my own reflection.

Sometimes the world sees composure while I’m privately trying to keep my heart from cracking open over the fact that a man who harmed me is still free and I am still the one expected to be legible, reasonable, alive, and socially coherent about all of it.

Perception is rude like that. It catches one angle and calls it the whole woman.

That’s one of the reasons I keep coming back to this journal, honestly. Because writing feels like a fight against flattening. A fight against the way perception simplifies. The way people pick one visible truth and build a whole lazy cathedral around it because complexity asks more of them than they’re willing to give.

I am more than what is easiest to perceive.

I am more than what happened to me. More than how I present. More than how well I ‘pass’. More than whether the room reads me correctly or not. More than the confidence people project onto me because they have no idea how expensive it is to be this woman in this world with this history in this body and still show up looking like I probably have it handled.

That sentence is true by the way.

I may not always see myself the way the world does, but I know the world sees something. I haven’t been misgendered in well over a year, and I’ve only really been in this truest phase of transition for two. So either I blend well, or the confidence lands harder than I think it does, or maybe, and this is the one that catches in my throat a little, maybe I really am the beautiful, confident woman so many people seem to believe they’re looking at.

I wish that landed simply. It doesn’t.

Because perception works in both directions. There are days I can almost borrow the world’s eyes and see her. The woman. The one I fought so hard for. The one with softness and spine and beauty that does not need permission. And then there are other days where my own lens is less generous. More intimate. More haunted by what I know, what I’ve lived, what I carry.

That’s real too.

So yes, perception is incredible. It can give you glimpses. It can reveal. It can affirm. It can make a whole identity suddenly click into place in one glance from the right person.

And it can also distort the hell out of everything.

Roger, for his part, perceives himself as a lap dog, a neighborhood enforcer, a philosopher, and a flawless angel with no behavioral record whatsoever. His self image is aspirational. I respect the consistency.

Maybe that’s the move, honestly. Not to become immune to perception. Impossible. But to get clearer about which lenses matter. Which eyes I trust. Which readings of me feel true in the body. Which ones leave me smaller, and which ones somehow hand me more of myself back.

That is a worthier use of my energy than trying to control every version of me wandering around in other people’s minds. Let them look. I know there’s more here than they can clock in one glance.

Chaos in one hand. Grace in the other.

And me, living somewhere between the woman the world sees, the woman I feel, and the woman who knows exactly how dangerous that difference can be.