Part 2 (In Shawn's Words): Who I Might Have Been

People like numbers.

Scores.

Labels.

Clean edges.

I didn’t grow up clean.

I learned early how to read a room.

Not because I was special.

Because guessing wrong was dangerous.

Tone.

Posture.

When someone stopped talking too fast.

When someone got quiet.

That kind of awareness keeps you alive.

Doesn’t leave much room for anything else.

I didn’t know what EQ was back then.

IQ, sure.

That one got talked about.

I just knew my head never stopped working and my emotions were either too loud or missing altogether.

Later, they tried to explain it.

IQ.

EQ.

IQ is capacity.

Patterns.

Reasoning.

Memory.

Problem-solving.

It doesn’t change.

Life doesn’t bend it.

Trauma doesn’t break it.

It just takes it hostage.

Decides where all that brainpower goes.

Mine went to survival.

EQ.

That’s harder to pin down.

Awareness.

Empathy.

Knowing what other people feel.

Knowing what you feel.

If you’re allowed to.

I wasn’t.

Here’s the part that messes with me:

You can have emotional intelligence

and still not be able to touch it.

It doesn’t go away.

It gets buried.

Depends on the room.

Depends on who’s watching.

There are days I read people with frightening accuracy.

I catch shifts most miss.

I know when someone’s lying before they do.

Other days, there’s nothing there.

I shut down.

Disappear.

Go quiet.

Looks like I don’t care.

I care.

That’s the problem.

Trauma didn’t make me intelligent.

It forced every skill into defensive positions.

Pattern recognition became threat detection.

Empathy became risk assessment.

Intuition became anticipation.

Stay ahead.

Stay small.

Stay alive.

That works when you’re trapped.

Doesn’t work for much else.

Sometimes I wonder—

If none of that had happened,

if I hadn’t learned to think like this,

who I would’ve been?

Not better.

Just different.

Someone who didn’t have to spend every thought

making sure nothing went wrong.

Someone who could use what was already there

for something other than staying alive.

I don’t know.

I just know there was more in me

than I ever got to use.