You are a figure stuffed with straw

Strength is an act of selection. My weakness is a matter of framing. Of course I’d be weak when everything I successfully do is moralized about or shamed. My weakness is a matter of which lens you’re using, based on the thing you're trying to define about yourself.

Anything is too strong for "our enemies." Being strong is not an objective state. It's a social identifier based on where you stand and which line is being drawn.

One example of this is being called "intimidating." Socially, if you get called intimidating a lot, you haven't actually achieved some objective high place in a given hierarchy. It means your intimidating qualities are unusual and noticeable. It means you are scary when you shouldn't have been, in the place you were not supposed to be. You're powerful enough to destabilize other people's sense of themselves, and powerless enough for them to think they can defang you, and that they should.

I should've known my power existed: people often remarked on it as though it were out of place. It is very hard to know what your talents are when you're shamed for your influence, the subtext being that people believe you should have none.

You believe you're weak because someone thinks you're beautiful. They appreciate this about you while mocking it, because they believe it should have been theirs. You believe you are too loud, because other people remark on this, while having voices that boom around a room. Someone laughs at you, not because you're actually embarrassing, but because they're embarrassed by the dynamic between you. They're embarrassed by how you relate to them, how they relate to you, and what that distance reveals about each of you.

It's ridiculous to treat people like they're both infantile and aggressively powerful, weak and immature and helpless and yet holding some wild sway over the culture. You are not failing, you are interrupting a narrative, the way an enemy will always be "too strong" when you are against it.

Depending on who you are, where you stand, what body you have, what culture you exist in, what social stories you all exist inside … Your delicate fragility will be treated as an unearned privilege, and so will your loudness and influence. Your intellect will be shamed as a frivolous pursuit, and so will your emotion. You cannot be just-right inside another person's story. There are zero accomplishments that can be good enough inside a narrative that was always supposed to be for somebody else.

It's too daring to even imply people have a specific bias at all, which would imply the story is ever about you.

You're a figure stuffed with straw, a changeling who's replaced the real child people believed they were supposed to have.