“You’re too kind." I’m told as if kindness were a flaw I haven’t learned to correct.
They say it the way someone would talk about a bruise, soft, sympathetic, but still implying I did something wrong.
I’ve never known how to respond.
Do they want me to apologize for it? To dull it down so they feel more comfortable watching me care?
I’ve spent my life being treated like someone easy to figure out, the gentle one, the steady one, the one who forgives too easily, who loves too quietly.
But they never see how often I choose restraint over reaction, not because I’m weak, but because I’ve learned that some people only listen to kindness after it’s been swallowed by silence.
I think people underestimate me because they can’t imagine that softness could survive by choice.
They mistake my empathy for innocence, as if I’ve never been burned before. But I’ve seen cruelty up close. I’ve been on the receiving end of it, learned its rhythm, its logic.
I just decided not to let it become my language.
Still, it hurts, how easily people assume I don’t notice when I’m being dismissed, or talked over, or taken advantage of.
They think I don’t see the small cruelties, the way affection shifts when I stop giving more than I receive.
But I notice, it might not be everything, but I notice.
Kindness doesn’t make me blind, it makes me pay attention to what people think they’re hiding.
Sometimes I want to ask them what they think kindness costs me, if they believe it comes without grief, without calculation, without exhaustion.
As if it isn’t a constant negotiation between wanting to protect others and wanting to protect myself.
As if being gentle were easy.
There’s still a sharpness beneath my calm. It’s not anger exactly, but a kind of quiet defiance, the refusal to let the world harden me into something smaller.
I’ve been underestimated for so long that part of me has learned to hide behind it. It’s safer to let people think I’m harmless than to show them how deliberate I could be if I chose to.
If someone says I’m too kind, I hear a different part: You make me feel guilty for what I can’t give back.
And I wonder if that’s what they really mean, that my care feels like a mirror they don’t want to look into.
But I won’t apologize for that.
I’d rather be misunderstood for being gentle than be praised for becoming indifferent.
My kindness isn’t a weakness. It’s a boundary I built from pain. It’s the strength to keep choosing openness, even after the world taught me how easy it is to close.
If that makes me “too kind,” then fine.
I’d rather be too much of that than not enough of myself.
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