Misunderstood

When I was young, I read a book that stayed with me long after I turned the last page. It was called Misunderstood by Florence Montgomery. It wasn’t the most famous book, but there was something about it—the ache of not being seen for who you are, the quiet loneliness of being misread, the frustration of knowing your own heart but feeling like no one else does.

I didn’t have the words for it back then, but I do now: to be misunderstood is to feel invisible.

And maybe that’s the real fracture at the heart of everything happening now.

Long before the fighting, before the headlines, before the protests and the politics—maybe the divide began with a misunderstanding.

City people think rural people are ignorant.
Rural people think city people are arrogant.
Men think women are impossible to please.
Women think men don’t even try to understand them.
One generation thinks the other is destroying everything good. The other thinks they are trying to fix what was broken.

And at some point, no one stopped to ask: What if we got each other wrong?

Misunderstandings don’t start wars, but they plant the seeds for them.
They don’t break relationships overnight, but they chip away at them, bit by bit.
They turn neighbors into strangers. They turn disagreements into battle lines.
They make people dig in their heels, not because they are certain they are right, but because they are exhausted from feeling unheard.

And what happens when two sides—any two sides—both feel misunderstood?

They stop listening.
They stop trusting.
They stop seeing each other as human.

And maybe that’s where we are now.

So what do we do about it?

I don’t know if there’s an easy answer. But I do know this—every great conflict, every fracture in history, every divide between people didn’t start with hatred.

It started with a misunderstanding.

And maybe, just maybe, that means it can end with something else.