DRAWN TO THE MARGINS

Teachers and authority figures were never truly on your side—they enforced rules that favored kids who looked and acted different from you 🏫. You learned early that asking for help from mainstream institutions could mean being humiliated, judged, or having your differences scrutinized rather than supported. Schools and official places became territory where your difference was seen as wrong or inferior, not celebrated, embraced or even tolerated. Your survival instincts became incredibly sharp because you had to learn who would accept the real you—people who shared your background and understood what it meant to be an outsider. You learned to find safety in similarity, gravitating toward those who wouldn't judge you or your family's ways or make you feel ashamed of who you were. You became skilled at building authentic connections with people with your experience, but this came at a cost—the people who understood you often had as little power to help themselves as you did.

Now you find yourself drawn to partners from similar backgrounds who won't judge you, but who bring their own emotional heavy baggage 🌀. You're comfortable sharing your truth with people who understand your story, but struggle when those same people can't provide the stability and peace you need. You have trouble knowing when someone who gets your experience is actually good for your wellbeing. When relationship conflicts arise, you feel stuck within the same circle of people who understand your struggles, but share the same problems. You've developed remarkable skills for building authentic connections with complex people, but often at the expense of creating secure attachments.

At your core, you accept the trade-off that the people who will accept you can't keep the relationship stable, and the people who could keep it stable won't accept you. You've got incredible ability to create deep bonds with people who experienced hardships and can love others through their worst moments 💪. You can see beyond someone's surface behaviors to their underlying pain and potential. But this wisdom came at a devastating cost: you learned that being able to trust someone and being emotionally secure with them never come from the same person. The cruel irony is that your gift for connecting with authentic, yet troubled people often leaves you surrounded by those who can't provide the peace and stability you need.