There is a list you keep and have never written down.

A name goes on it the evening a friend questions a decision you were sure of.
Another goes on the night you explain something that matters to you and watch it land small.

Nobody sees you add them. One name at a time, the list grows.
Call it a mental register: the people who don't understand you.

Two beliefs sit side by side in you. You read people well. People keep failing to read you. Both cannot be true.

What we call understanding is a guess, on both sides. We simply grade our own guesses as understanding, and everyone else's as the gap.

At a phase of my lowest low, I felt that no one understands me. I got there by gradually adding more and more names to my mental register of those who don't care to understand me.

A friend over coffee who could not follow the grand plan I was chasing: they were in the boat with me, but I was mentally inside the ship.

A close friend who questioned my decision to go back to exam prep for a second masters at 35.

By then my register was already full, and hardly a few names were left.

My father was one of the few left.

In 2023 I had sunk myself into AI, eighteen hours a day on the system. My family did not ask, and I had no concrete answer anyway. Then, after some months, my father asked what I was doing.

I tried to explain. But every time I tried, I was short of words with every next question. The questions were candid, genuine, caring. And the answers were losing their patience with each subsequent one.

How do you hand someone the newness, the potential, the pace, the surge? The logic of effort without definite result?

You are trying to explain it to someone on the different bank of the river.
I left that conversation with his name halfway onto the page.

There comes a point when almost everyone is on the other side, and you are the misunderstood one.

Stay there long enough and the misunderstood one stops being a mood. It becomes who you are.

When life pushes you against the wall, the typical advice is to collect your willpower and fight back.

I learned another power. Wall power.

You sit against the wall and see yourself: “How come the whole world is on the other side? Either I am not seeing something, or I am not able to see something.”

Einstein called insanity doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. I had learned that intellectually. But, against the wall, I lived it.

In life, others see what we offer them to see, and in my case, what I offered was a worldview where I am right, and all my decisions. I was living the persona of someone who has arrived, philosophically profound and witty with wordplay.

For most of us, the register has two columns.

Both are poisonously dangerous, a double-edged sword held by its blade, tighter and tighter.

Now look at what you were offering the people in either column.

Some names went on the list because they missed the version of you that you were busy performing. The rest went on because they could not cross to where you stood.

The natural conclusion is: explain better, or find better people. That is half right. Some people genuinely are not listening.

But think of the people who were listening, whose questions were already caring. The words were never the problem. The river was.

Try it on yourself.

Can you actually explain how you feel about your life to someone? Not the headline, the real texture of it?

You can't. None of us can.

One is the feeling only you can feel. The other is what another person can guess, and however accurate the guess, the delta remains: the part of you no guess can reach, because it is impossible to fill.

Psychologists have a name for half of this, the illusion of transparency: we believe what we feel is more visible to others than it is.

And we go one step further: we assume our capacity to feel our feeling is achievable by the other person as well, and when it isn't, we reach for the register.

This doesn't mean understanding is impossible.
It means it is impossible in a way we expect and define it.

So here is the cut the register was hiding. Understanding and standing with are two different things, and we have been grading people on the wrong one.

Understanding, the way we define it, asks the other person to cross the river: to arrive on your bank and feel what you feel. No one can.

Standing with asks something else. It asks them to stay on their own bank, face you, keep guessing, and trust the direction you are walking.

My father never crossed. His guess is relying on my decision. Though he doesn't understand everything, or rather hardly a slice of it, he knows a broad idea: I am working on building something for the larger good, shaping thinking in some way. AI is an enabler.

That slice was enough to hold me.

Understanding was never the thing I needed from him. He gave me something better, and I spent years calling the better thing a shortfall.

You have people like this too.

If you want one thing to try, let it be this.

The next time a name is heading for the register, you could ask: “Are they failing to understand me, or standing with me without understanding?”

You might hear this as: “So we are all alone… just guessing?”
It is the opposite.

Think back to that night you explained something that mattered and watched it land small. If love means being perfectly understood, that night was a failure.

But look again. Someone was still there on the other bank, facing you, still asking.

The delta is not proof that no one cares. It is simply the price of having an inner life at all.

Seeing this once won’t switch it off.

On a low day, the old reflex will still arrive: “they don’t get me”, and a name will start drifting towards your register.

And you probably keep more than one register: one at work, one at home, one for the friends you have known longest.

Your register is still there. But you can read it differently now. It was never a list of people who failed to understand you. It was a list of people standing on the other bank, facing you, guessing as close as they could.

Until next week,

love,
aayush

hustle peacefully!