Always Second Place

What the cold shoulder looks like when it grows up.

Photo by choose your stories on Unsplash

I had a boyfriend when I went to Stony Brook University. We had a fight, I don’t even remember what it was about anymore, and I went cold.

Not cold like distant. Cold like my mother. I stopped speaking to him. If he spoke to me, I looked through him. He was air. He didn’t exist.

At some point in the middle of doing it, I woke up, like coming out of a trance. A thought arrived, clear and unbidden: other people don’t do this. This isn’t normal.

It sounds simple. It wasn’t. I had grown up in a house where this was just how conflict worked. My mother’s version was silence so complete it made you question whether you were real. You could ask a direct question and receive nothing. No answer, no acknowledgment, just the ice cold wall of her turned back.

My father’s version was loud and physical. Walls had holes in them by Saturday morning. He’d spend the rest of the weekend fixing them.

Two styles. One core lesson: conflict is dangerous. Avoid it at all costs.

And of course, the avoidance of conflict usually creates the exact conflict you were trying to avoid.

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I decided to stop using the cold shoulder as a first move after that day at Stony Brook. I can tell you I made that decision and I meant it.

What I can’t tell you is that I stopped.

When someone in a future relationship went cold on me, I’d relapse into that familiar territory. And familiar is the right word. It wasn’t comfort exactly, it was recognition.

I know how to function here. I know the rules of this space.

What I didn’t see until recently, working through the Human Architect Philosophy and Psychology manual, is that I didn’t actually escape the pattern.

I evolved it.

The cold shoulder adapted. It became strategic silence. Becoming very quiet. Speaking only when spoken to.

Absorbing things instead of naming them.

From the outside, it looked like I was low-drama, easy-going, a breath of fresh air compared to whoever came before me. My husband has said as much. He talks about his ex-wives with exhaustion and then looks at me like I’m a different species.

For a long time I took that as a compliment.

What I understand now is that the pattern that started as a survival strategy in childhood, stay small, don’t make waves, don’t give them a reason to freeze you out, got repackaged into something that looked like a personality trait.

And then it got rewarded. Which made it almost impossible to see.

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There’s something underneath all of this that I’ve been contemplating.

My sister and I were raised differently. She was difficult in ways I wasn’t, and my parents managed her by giving her whatever she wanted. Which meant I learned, early and without anyone saying it directly, that I come second.

Not as a rule. As a fact about me. As an identity.

I come second becomes: I don’t ask for what I want. I don’t know what I need.

I absorb and accommodate and make myself easy because somewhere in my body the old code is still running, and the old code says the alternative is being frozen out. Being invisible. Being nothing.

You cannot sustain change you can’t see.

You can’t rewrite a story you don’t know you’re telling.

That’s how the brain works. The story running below your decisions is in charge of making them.

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It’s important to add that my parents were not villains. They were humans with their own conditioning, doing their best with what they had. My sister was genuinely challenging. They were managing a hard situation imperfectly.

This is the place that M.U.D. forms. Misguided Unconscious Decisions. I created the meaning, I told myself the story.

It was all I could do because I didn’t have the wisdom, knowledge, or maturity to see it any other way. That is simply true.

And the work I’m doing now isn’t about assigning blame, it’s about updating the blueprint. Jade Teta has a phrase I keep coming back to: teach from the scar, not the wound.

I’m writing this from the scar.

The lightning strikes that took me into my awakening phase were never dramatic. They were small moments of clarity.

A thought in the middle of giving someone the cold shoulder, a lunch with a friend in my early twenties who called me a drama queen and made me realize there had been a phase where the suppressed feelings leaked out messily before I found the more refined version of the pattern.

These weren’t breakthroughs. They were cracks in the wall of conditioning. Enough light peeking through to start asking: wait, is this me?

That question, maybe this is me, not them, is where everything begins.

If you’ve been asking it, you already know.

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This summer I’m running something I’ve never offered before. Six weeks, entirely focused on Perception, because you cannot be differently until you see differently. Not as a concept. As a lived, practiced, cellular shift.

It’s called The Perception Experiment. It starts July 13. Full details coming soon.

If something in this piece landed for you, say so in the comments. You might be saying it for someone else too.