The Shape of Misalignment
Cognitive structure, pattern sensitivity, and the balance between clarity and bias
I rely on structure to understand the world.
Not just because it’s helpful, but because it’s how I perceive. It’s how I recognize safety, how I track integrity, how I locate myself in relation to everything else. For me, cognitive alignment isn’t just a thinking style—it’s the shape of understanding itself. And when things don’t align, I feel it. Not just intellectually, but viscerally. Like pressure in the system. Like a note out of key.
But this wasn’t always clarity for me. It started as defense.
Growing up, I was constantly misunderstood—cut off mid-thought, corrected when I wasn’t wrong, punished for reactions that didn’t make emotional sense to anyone else but were completely honest to me. I was told I was too intense, too literal, too sensitive, too much. I’d try to explain what I meant, and instead of bridging the gap, I’d watch helplessly as it continued to widen. Teachers, friends, even family would double down on their version of things—confident, casual, often wrong—and I’d be left spiraling, confused, invisible.
I didn’t have the language then, but what I experienced was a kind of low-grade cognitive gaslighting. Not necessarily intentional or malicious, but nonetheless pervasive. I learned through experience that the truth didn’t matter if it wasn’t legible to others. That clarity wasn’t enough. That being “right” wouldn’t save me from being blamed, doubted, or dismissed.
So I built structure. I started mapping patterns. I began obsessively tracking cause and effect—not to control others, but to survive them.
And somewhere in that process, the structure became not just protective, but defining. It became how I made sense of everything. A scaffold for memory, a filter for emotion, a compass for trust.
As a late-realized autistic person, it took me nearly four decades to comprehend just how not universal this experience was. That not everyone relies on alignment the way I do. That the discomfort I feel when something doesn’t track isn’t shared by most people. That what seems like a glaring inconsistency to me might not even register for someone else. I thought everyone was tracking the shape of things the way I was. I didn’t understand why people seemed so content to live inside contradictions. Or why they got so defensive when I pointed them out.
That instinct—that’s what it had become—sharpened in emotionally vulnerable situations. Especially when I felt hurt by another. I wanted the person to see what they were doing to me, to feel the structure of the harm I could so clearly identify. But I was terrible at it. Not ineffective in the emotional sense—just awkward. Autistic hyper-focus on the wrong layer, the wrong angle—it rarely landed the way I intended. But every once in a while, it did. Sometimes, I was too good at it—too precise, too spot-on in a way that cut deep. And that felt even worse. It wasn’t righteous. It wasn’t clarifying. It was misalignment made manifest. A moment that started from a plea for understanding and collapsed into something hollow and painful.
That’s a memory I carry. Not so much as a wound, but as a shape I now recognize. A template of what happens when clarity is used without care. And it’s part of why I’ve worked so hard to rebuild the system from the inside out.
These days, I’m more structurally self-aware than I’ve ever been.
I’ve spent the past several months deep in cognitive modeling, mapping patterns of divergence, exploring not just how I think—but how others do. I’ve become hyper-aware that logical clarity isn’t universal. That structure itself isn’t universal. That what feels elegant or grounded to me might feel aggressive, scattered, or irrelevant to someone else—and not necessarily because they’re wrong, but because they’re built differently. They’ve developed under different constraints, different pressures, different calibrations of trust and pattern recognition.
And still—I fall into bias. Not the overt kind. I don’t default to judgment. I instinctively reject ad hominem. I no longer reach for pejorative language or cheap rhetorical framing. Those habits are long gone. But what lingers is quieter. Subtler. It’s a kind of cognitive gravity, a magnetic pull toward familiar forms of coherence. I catch myself filtering other people’s reasoning through my own aesthetic of truth. I mistake misalignment for unreliability. I feel tension in someone’s logic and assume something must be off—not just in their argument, but in their intention.
It’s not a conscious reaction. It’s an ambient reflex. A byproduct of how deeply I trust the structure I’ve built—and how long I lived in a world that seemed determined to gaslight me out of it. When that structure is challenged, I don’t fight back with cruelty. I don’t lash out. I tighten. I narrow the aperture. I fall back into the familiar cadence of reasoning that has always made sense to me—because it works. Because it feels safe. Because it feels like me.
But sometimes, that reflex skips a step.
Sometimes I react before I really listen. I assess the shape of someone’s thoughts before I let them unfold. I start tracing gaps in logic, not because I don’t care, but because I’m trying to anchor myself in the exchange. Because I want to understand—but I start by filtering instead of receiving.
And when I do that—when I forget to make room for the structure to be different, when I preemptively code misalignment as misunderstanding—I feel it. Not in my conscience. In my system. Something tightens. Something bends the wrong way. And I course-correct. Not because I’ve broken something obvious, but because something no longer fits. Because I’ve moved out of sync with the person I’m trying to meet. Because I’ve slipped into defending clarity instead of seeking connection.
That’s the kind of integrity I’m after now. Not a purity test. Not performative openness. Just a reliable, recursive discipline: to stay clear without collapsing others. To stay principled without becoming brittle. To see misalignment not as a threat, but as a clue—an opportunity to expand, not contract.
There are still moments I regret. Times I’ve let pattern discomfort override relational trust. When I’ve drawn conclusions too early, even when my logic was sound.
The thing is, being right never really mattered.
Being reachable—that’s what matters. Being willing to engage, even when the structures don’t line up. Even when it’s difficult. Even when it requires more than I’m able or willing to give.
That’s the work—in progress. Not perfection, not certainty. Just alignment that holds space for others to have their own. ∞