Exclusionary Tactics

I lost a great deal of time mistaking other people’s expectations for responsibilities I was obliged to meet. Not because they were explicit, but because they were ambient. They arrived as tone, as assumption, as the quiet sense that something was already required before any choice was made. Quietly, over years, I volunteered to process unresolved disorder as if it were my own, absorbing it through proximity, curiosity, and communicative entanglement until it felt intrinsic. What registered as sorrow, delay, or personal failure was often prolonged exposure to entropy that did not belong to me, carried within social instruments that stabilise by offloading excess onto whoever will hold it. This demanded steady, unacknowledged self-sacrifice, and a pragmatic alignment with whatever dominant tropes or belief systems happened to be circulating, because that is often what survival appears to require.

Those expectations never truly fit. They were like childhood shoes worn long after growth had occurred, producing pain misread as clumsiness rather than a simple error of scale. With distance, what once felt like shared understanding resolves into convenience: a region where complexity is reduced until it can be navigated, and treated as sufficient. The hidden cost of order—of mechanism, algorithm, institution, even well-formed grammar—is paid in human nervous systems. Efficiency does not erase cost; it redistributes it. Order persists by relocating strain, often beyond the frame in which it was generated.

There is no fixed centre anchoring any of this. What appears as one is a statistical artefact, visible only in aggregate, sustained because meaning does not close, and communication persists by remaining generatively incomplete. Language positions before it explains. Bodies and expectations are oriented prior to meaning, before intent, before consent. If meaning ever resolved cleanly, language would collapse under its own maladaptive certainty. An experience of sustained psychosocial marginalisation reduced the field until its mechanics became visible. Alienation acutely illustrates structural biases. Speaking from there is not withdrawal but leverage: gaining purchase on how systems actually function beneath the narratives they tell about themselves.

From that vantage, a deeper symmetry becomes unavoidable. Apparent unity is achieved by displacement. Tension, cost, and consequence are shifted to other times, other places, other faces, or abstracted enough to disappear from immediate awareness. Inclusion is produced alongside exclusion, just as wealth, in any complex system, is anchored upon poverty elsewhere. There is no shortcut to stability that does not move burden outward, no quick fix that does not defer pressure to another point in the field. Unsustainable agendas fail not through malice but through structural blindness. What breaks is not morality but intelligence: the inability to follow consequence once it leaves the frame.

This text is not only describing that process. It is operating inside it. Language here is doing what it always does at depth: registering experience while simultaneously generating the conditions under which that experience becomes legible. Choice and intent arrive late, downstream of a pregrounded semiotic environment that was already sorting relevance and obligation before any words were chosen. We speak inside abstractions that precede us. It is the delta, the phase delay we inhabit—where expectation, as priming and as the imprint of linguistic receptivity, is already felt as responsibility before anything is ever said, thought, or known. I never accepted that responsibility, because I did not recognise it as such, and could never conscientiously validate the terms by which it was imposed.