I’ve never been good with people.
From my earliest memories, I’ve found humans confusing – not in the way that puzzles or Sudoku are, but in the way a language you’ve never heard bewilders you when everyone else seems to speak it fluently.
Other kids seemed to navigate the social world in a way I couldn’t. They knew the difference between moments when someone was joking and when they were hurt. They understood the difference between friendly teasing and cruelty. They could read the room. I couldn’t.
So I retreated to fiction. But not the lame kind your teachers force you to read at school – instead, I discovered Wattpad fanfiction. And something inside me clicked.
These characters, with their consistent motivations and defined arcs, made sense to me in a way real people never did. When Suga from BTS was upset at Jackson Wang’s party, I could follow his reasoning. When Louis Partridge was nervous about seeing his crush at his movie’s premiere, I understood why.
From the ages of eight to 14, I must have read thousands of stories. I studied these characters the way other people studied for exams. I learned the grammar of human feeling through the safety of a screen. The answers were all there, spelled out in dialogue and description.
Years later, I joined my high school’s speech and debate team. Speech seems counterintuitive for someone who struggles with human connection, but something about it made sense. It could have been the framework, the structure for understanding how to make an argument through storytelling and statistics.
Or maybe I’d spent so many years studying characters that I’d accidentally learned how to read people.
As I attended more tournaments and saw more and more performances, I started to notice things. The way in which someone’s voice would change when they were uncertain of something. The pause before a brutal truth. The nonverbal cues that indicate discomfort or engagement. All those patterns I’d learned from fiction started appearing in real life.
I won’t pretend I’ve mastered it. I still miss cues 50 percent of the time, and I still say the wrong thing.
But I’m better now.
Looking back, I don’t think younger me was broken. I just needed to look at the world from a new perspective. While other people learned the language of emotion through immersion, I required textbooks. I needed characters whose feelings were narrated and explained.
And maybe that’s alright.
I still read fanfiction, but not with the same intent I once did. Now, it’s more of a comfort than a curriculum. I’m still grateful for all the years that fictional characters were my guides through the wilderness of human emotion. They taught me how to understand people in my life and, eventually, how to connect with them.
Human emotions are complex. That will never really change. But these days, I find them a little less impossible to understand.
And that, I’ve learned, is enough.
