How Much Of Me Is Compensation?
Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe
How much of me is compensation—
not character, not inclination,
but response?
How much of what I call strength
is simply what happens
when softness is not permitted
to survive unattended?
I have learned to move through the world
overprepared.
Overcapable.
Braced.
I anticipate absence
the way others anticipate weather.
I stockpile resolve.
I build redundancies
where care should have been.
If I am resilient,
it is because something essential
was unreliable.
If I am perceptive,
it is because I had to learn
to read rooms
before they learned to read me.
If I am self-sufficient,
it is because dependence
proved too costly
to maintain.
We praise these adaptations—
call them admirable, enviable,
a testament to fortitude—
without asking
what conditions required them.
No one wonders
how much effort it takes
to become unbreakable
when breaking would have been
the more honest outcome.
I wonder who I would be
if I had not needed
to compensate so fluently.
If calm would still feel earned.
If competence would feel neutral.
If rest would arrive
without suspicion.
Some of what I carry
is skill.
Some of it is talent.
But some of it—
the relentless vigilance,
the refusal to falter,
the way I stay standing
long after the body asks to sit—
is unpaid labour for losses
that were never acknowledged.
I am not mourning who I became.
She kept me alive.
But I am curious
about who never got the chance
to arrive
because she was too busy
making sure I could endure.
How much of me is compensation?
Enough to know
that survival reshapes the architecture
of a person—
and that what looks like strength
from the outside
is often evidence
of what should never
have been required.
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