Funhouse Mirrors & Other Distortions

What Gets Lost in Systems That Can’t See You

Bias is often framed as a problem of ignorance—something external, obvious, and easy to spot. But it doesn’t always look like hate. It doesn’t always sound like a slur or a snub.

Sometimes bias shows up coded and calculated.
Sometimes it sounds like feedback.
Sometimes it’s embedded in the very systems designed to help us grow.

That’s what makes it so slippery—and why the damage it causes is often overlooked. It doesn’t just silence. It distorts. And over time, if you’re not careful, it teaches you that you might not be wholly human.

One of the most corrosive forms of bias is buried in professional language.

In interviews, it feels invasive and loaded rather than appropriately curious.
In performance reviews, we leave feeling small and labeled rather than aligned.

These are not neutral observations. They are projections shaped by culture, comfort, and control. They often target those of us who don’t conform easily.

They say: We want authenticity. But not like that.
They say: We value difference as long as it is narrow.

Nearly a decade ago, I was encouraged to work with an executive coach and as part of that work, there were a battery of personality and leadership assessments. I approached it with openness. Meaningful insight might emerge. I thought I’d be understood more deeply. I wanted to grow.

The assessments were interpreted by a professional analyst from little bubbles into a narrative.

Relational Style
“You may under-focus on networking, seem introverted, and don’t play the calculated relationship management game.”

Tolerance for Ambiguity + Relationship to Structure
“You may undervalue others’ need for structure or traditional order. You might underestimate people’s motivation to avoid risk and could be perceived as destabilizing in ambiguous spaces.”

Work Style + Execution
“You’re visionary, creative, aesthetically aware—and maybe too much so. You may over-focus on refining things that are already good enough.”

Communication Style
“You rely on candor but could benefit from more subtlety and diplomacy.”

I came away from that process with a distorted mirror—one that made my strengths look dangerous:

Vision looked like a distraction.
Autonomy looked like defiance.
Clarity looked like aggression.
Discernment looked like coldness.
Imagination looked like instability.

In retrospect, I understand that the process pathologized core traits of my personality. But, at the time, I tried with all of my might to smooth my edges, sand my corners, hold my breath. Until I couldn’t and just stopped trying.

Metabolizing it didn’t happen all at once.

I walked away with confusion, shame, and a sense that something fundamental in me had been seen—but misnamed. It took years even to locate the wound, much less trust what it was trying to say.

Initially, I attempted to reframe it in their terms. Maybe I was too independent. I needed to tone something down. Perhaps I had been difficult. That’s what bias does—it doesn’t just distort what others see. It begins to distort self-perception.

But the part of me that had been misread—misnamed, really—never stopped pulling at the thread. I’d be in other rooms, years later, and the same question would resurface: Why do I still feel like I have to explain my way into legitimacy?

Eventually, I realized: I wasn’t holding onto the pain.
The pain was holding onto a part of me I hadn’t retrieved.

That retrieval happened in a medicine space. On the floor. In the quiet. When everything I had been holding came to the forefront.

The insight wasn’t verbal. It didn’t arrive as a mantra or a breakthrough.
It arrived as certainty—in my body, not my mind.

The moment I felt it, I knew:
They were wrong about me.
They never saw me.
And I am no longer willing to be interpreted through a distorted lens.

Psychedelic medicine didn’t erase the harm.
It gave me access to the part of me that remembered who I was before the distortion.
It let me feel the distance between my truth and their projection.
It let me release the looping need to explain or justify.

I listened to the part of me who had been running and told her:
You no longer have to perform for safety. You don’t have to outrun the lie.

And I let the part of me who still held hope finally grieve. Not just the betrayal, but the years she spent trying to make herself legible.

Integration didn’t mean finding a silver lining.
It meant severing the cord that tethered my worth to their approval.
It meant metabolizing the experience without internalizing the story.

A Word for Those Still Carrying It

If you’ve ever been misread—professionally, relationally, institutionally—
If someone told you that your instincts were a liability…
If a system were to try to translate your clarity into something more manageable…

You are not alone.
And you are not the story they wrote about you.

Here’s what I know: the moment you stop trying to make it make sense—and start listening to the part of you that always knew—it begins to loosen.

That’s where the work lives now:
In discerning what’s yours to carry, and what was never yours at all.
In listening to your body’s truth, not the narrative that was handed to you.
In naming what was distorted, without letting it define you.

You don’t need to be more palatable to be powerful.
You don’t need to explain your way back into the room.

You belong to yourself.

That’s the only mirror that matters.