Relational Field Theory

Maybe I’m Not a Bug. Maybe I’m a Feature.

For most of my life, I’ve woken up with a familiar feeling: that I was somehow out of place in the world. Not broken, exactly — just fundamentally misaligned with everyone around me. Too intense. Too sensitive. Too alert. Too much.

When you grow up inside a major loss, especially one that no one knows how to talk about, you start to assume the problem is you. You learn to read yourself through the reactions of others. You learn to shrink, to compensate, to overperform, to stay ahead of collapse. You learn to survive by becoming hyper‑attuned to everything.

And for a long time, I thought that made me defective.

But something shifted recently — quietly, but unmistakably. I woke up one morning and felt something I hadn’t felt since I was ten years old, after my dad died:
maybe there’s a place for me in this world.

Not because anything dramatic happened. Not because I suddenly became someone different. But because I finally saw the architecture of my life for what it is.

The traits I once read as flaws — the depth, the vigilance, the pattern‑seeing, the emotional precision — weren’t malfunctions. They were adaptations. Intelligent ones. Necessary ones. They helped me survive a reality that arrived far too early and without explanation.

And now, as an adult, those same traits are not liabilities.
They’re capacities.

They let me build, create, understand, and connect in ways I never could have if my life had been easier. They let me see the world from angles most people never learn to look from. They let me make meaning out of chaos. They let me show up for others with a kind of clarity that only comes from living through the unthinkable.

So this is the shift:

I’m not a bug in the system.
I’m a feature shaped by the system I survived.

And if you’ve ever felt like you were “too much,” or “too different,” or “too intense,” maybe you’re not a bug either. Maybe you’re carrying a form of intelligence that was forged in circumstances no one else had to navigate. Maybe the thing you’ve been apologizing for is the thing that makes you irreplaceable.

I’m not saying the pain was worth it.
I’m saying the person you became deserves to be seen accurately.

And for the first time in a very long time, I can feel that truth landing in my own body.

Maybe I’m not a bug.
Maybe I’m a feature.