[A note on survival, kindness, and the nervous system learning new data]
I had to notice something uncomfortable about myself recently.
Not because something bad happened—but because something unexpectedly didn’t.
I met a man at work. And based on my history, my first response was not curiosity or neutrality. It was caution. Skittishness, even. The kind that arrives before language fully forms.
My brain began doing what it has learned to do very well: scanning for an angle.
What does he want?
Where is the hook?
When does this shift?
But the shift never came.
We struck up a conversation when we both were on break.
I have reason to be skittish.
I have survived things with a man, unfortunately, no woman should have to survive, and yet many of us do.
We paste the cracks in our porcelain.
We pick ourselves back up off the floor.
We rebirth ourselves after devastating trauma.
I don't want to continually see men as the apex predator, but unfortunately, that has been an experience of mine.
But that was not the case with Paul* (name changed to protect identities).
He showed me his diving photos. We were talking about my writing—about sirens and mermaids, and my interest in making them biologically grounded. He lit up and started talking about marine life, about dives, about an adolescent turtle he had seen underwater.
It was… ordinary. Enthusiastic. Uncomplicated.
And still, part of me kept waiting for the second half of the interaction.
The ask.
The pressure.
The moment where kindness reveals its cost.
It didn’t arrive.
Not with him.
He continued to be kind weeks later, and we talked about diving again. I asked how he got into it, he talked happily about his wife and daughter, how they loved it.
And then it didn’t arrive again with another coworker—different department, different energy, different conversation. We talked while walking to our cars after work, sun out, both of us tired in that end-of-day way. Just talking about work. Life. Nothing exceptional.
No shift. No hook. No turn.
Just people being… normal.
And I found myself unsettled by the absence of escalation.
That is not a sentence I expected to ever write.
Because I am not walking through the world believing I am the center of anything. It is not about ego. It is something older than that.
When you survive certain experiences, you don’t just remember them—you build systems around them. Internal systems. Predictive systems. Systems that try to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
You learn to see patterns early.
Sometimes so early that you start predicting outcomes before anything has actually unfolded.
I realized, sitting with these small interactions, that my system had become very efficient at one thing:
anticipating harm before harm has had a chance to appear.
And that system didn’t appear out of nowhere. It was built from experience. From moments where kindness did have a hook. Where safety was conditional. Where attention had a cost attached to it, even if it wasn’t stated upfront.
So the map made sense.
It still does, in certain contexts.
But I also had to confront something else:
sometimes the map is running ahead of the terrain.
Not because the terrain is safe in all directions, always.
But because not every new person is a continuation of the past.
That sounds simple. It isn’t.
Because the nervous system doesn’t update on logic. It updates on repetition.
And for a long time, my repetition data was not exactly reassuring.
So when kindness arrived without cost, without shift, without hidden transaction, I didn’t immediately recognize it as kindness.
I recognized it as incomplete information.
I waited for the rest of the file.
What’s interesting is that nothing dramatic changed these interactions. No confrontation, no revelation, no explanation. Just consistency.
A man showing me marine life because he enjoys marine life.
A colleague talking about work and walking to his car.
A conversation that begins and ends exactly where it appears to begin and end.
No hidden second act.
And over time, that created a strange internal dissonance.
Because I had become very good at preparing for escalation that never arrived.
There is a word I keep circling here, though I am careful with it: mapping.
Not men as a category. Not people as a category.
But patterns.
My nervous system had created a very specific map of how certain interactions unfold. And that map had once been useful. It probably still is in some environments.
But in others, it started to misfire.
The hardest part was not learning that kindness exists.
Intellectually, I already knew that.
The harder part was noticing that my body had not updated its understanding of what kindness can look like when it is not performing a function.
No persuasion.
No leverage.
No hidden expectation.
No eventual demand.
Just kindness that stays where it is placed.
It is strange to realize how unfamiliar that can feel when you are not used to it.
And I don’t think the answer is to throw the map away. The map was made for a reason. The better question is whether it can be revised without erasing what it was built to protect.
Because I don’t think this is a story about “good men” or “bad men,” or even about men at all in any simple sense.
It is a story about what happens when the nervous system encounters data that doesn’t confirm its predictions.
And how disorienting it can be when the prediction is not confirmed in the direction you expected.
What I am left with is not a resolution, but a quieter adjustment.
That maybe the goal is not to stop noticing patterns, but to allow room for exceptions without treating them as threats to the entire system.
To let kindness be just kindness when it shows up.
Without waiting for it to turn into something else.
And to notice, gently, when the map is speaking a little louder than the moment in front of you.
It made me address myself, and that, without meaning to perhaps I was being unfair. I am taking notice of that, and I am going to work on it. I can't immediately erase what happened to me, or how my brain clicks into place on what could happen, when being around a certain gender. But I can try to ease my breathing, and notice when someone is being kind because they genuinely enjoy my company. It might take effort, because of my life experiences, but I am going to try - and that's what matters.
