They decided what I was before I even had a chance to show them. They labeled me difficult, sumpungin, divisive, rebellious instead of asking why I was reacting or what I needed or how they were contributing to what they didn’t want to face. They kept using those labels like it was a fact, like it was my core identity when in reality, it was their failure to listen beyond what gives them certainty.

“Sumpong” is how they excused ignoring me. How they justified punishing emotion instead of understanding it. It gave them permission to stay blind. Because if I was just the moody one, then they never had to ask what was actually hurting me. What I was absorbing from them, what their behavior was shaping in me.

I was sensitive in a family that didn’t know how to honor sensitivity. I was honest in a system that punished truth. I was feeling in a world that called that overreacting. I have always felt their shame and disdain and how they didn’t want to look. They labeled me so they didn’t have to listen and made a child’s extreme sadness an inconvenience instead of a message, a cry.

But I was just a child and I deserved curiosity, not condemnation. I deserved attunement, not accusation. I deserved someone who didn’t poison everyone else against me. I didn’t deserve someone who used my love, loyalty, and protectiveness as a means to continue their denial that everyone else didn’t see or turned a blind eye to because it was easier to blame the already hurt child.

They measure things even as adult based on that lens. They let that version of me calcify in their minds so even now, as an adult, they still relate to me through that lie. I was never what they said and they didn’t see it and nobody asked what was underneath all that.