Illegibility Is Not Disobedience
On unspoken expectations and misplaced blame
Most conflict does not arise from defiance. It arises from unspoken rules being enforced as if they were agreements.
Someone holds an expectation internally — a timeline, a pressure, a sense of urgency. They do not name it. They do not signal it. They do not embody it.
And then they are irritated when the world fails to comply.
This dynamic is most visible with children, but it does not belong to childhood. It belongs to power.
Children move according to what is perceptible. Attention teaches them what matters. Rhythm teaches them what comes next. When an adult is physically present but mentally absent — scrolling, thinking, disengaged — the signal is unmistakable: nothing is required right now.
So children play. They linger. They inhabit time as something spacious and shared.
When irritation suddenly appears, it feels confusing because it is confusing. The rule was never announced. The shift was never marked. The expectation lived only inside someone else’s nervous system.
Frustration, in that moment, is not a response to misbehavior. It is a response to failed translation.
And then the mistake: responsibility is reassigned downward. Children are blamed for not intuiting what was never communicated. They are treated as if they should have read urgency in silence, discerned importance from absence, obeyed a clock they do not yet experience.
But time is not innate. It is learned relationally.
When adults enforce expectations retroactively, they are not teaching responsibility. They are teaching arbitrariness. They are teaching that the rules of the world exist elsewhere, invisible until punishment reveals them.
This is how trust erodes. Not through strictness, but through illegibility.
The same dynamic operates in reverse.
In one case, the future collapses forward into sudden enforcement. In the other, the past collapses backward into fixed identity.
Someone does a thing — or is perceived to do a thing — and suddenly that moment hardens into permanent truth. “This is who you are.” “This is what you always do.”
Time stops being sequential and becomes doctrinal.
I know this experience from the inside. There are conversations that leave me feeling pulled backward rather than moved forward. I’m willing to acknowledge impact. I care about how my actions land, even when my intent was different.
What’s hard is when acknowledgment hardens into a fixed story about who I “always” am. When that happens, I stop feeling like we’re talking about a specific moment and start feeling like I’m being held inside a version of the past that can’t be questioned or clarified.
Accountability requires sequence. It needs specificity: what happened, when it happened, how it landed. Without that, responsibility turns into something else — narrative fixation. A story that governs future interactions not through understanding, but through preemptive judgment.
This is temporal arrest. The past stops teaching and starts trapping.
I want to be careful here.
There’s a reason people grip the past so tightly. Harm that wasn’t witnessed. Patterns that kept repeating. The fear that softening the story means it didn’t happen, didn’t matter, will happen again.
That’s real. I’m not dismissing it.
Memory deserves care. Meaning deserves revision.
But there’s a difference between holding memory and weaponizing it. Between saying “this happened and it hurt” and saying “this is who you are and you cannot change.”
One allows for repair. The other forecloses it.
When the past becomes untouchable — when any attempt to clarify is treated as deflection, any question as threat — something breaks. Not just for the person being held in place, but for the relationship itself. Growth becomes illegible. Change cannot be received.
We end up asking people to remain frozen so we can keep knowing where to place our fear.
Here is the principle I refuse to abandon:
Responsibility belongs to the person who holds the expectation.
If something matters, it must be named. If time is limited, it must be signaled. If urgency exists, it must be made visible. If the past still governs, it must be spoken specifically enough to be addressed.
Anything else is not accountability. It is displacement.
This scales.
It applies to parents who enforce rules they never announced. To classrooms where students are penalized for standards that were implied but never stated. To workplaces where employees are judged against metrics they were never given. To relationships where resentment builds silently, then erupts as moral accusation. To cultures that confuse growth with freezing people in time.
Everywhere expectation is hidden and enforcement is loud, fear replaces cooperation. Everywhere people are punished for failing to read minds — or failing to remain legible to an old story — authority becomes brittle.
I am not interested in raising children, or participating in relationships, or building systems that require psychic compliance.
I am interested in legibility. In shared reality. In the idea that power carries the obligation to clarify, not confuse.
Defending children from misplaced blame is not indulgence. It is accuracy.
Asking for specificity in conflict is not deflection. It is the precondition for repair.
Moving forward requires something quieter and harder than either capitulation or defense: the willingness to keep the past accurate enough to be shared, and the present open enough to matter.
Otherwise, we are not practicing accountability. We are practicing control — temporal, relational, invisible until it strikes.
I choose a different stance.
I choose to live where expectations are spoken, transitions are marked, and responsibility lands where it belongs. Where the past can be questioned because it is trusted, not because it is dismissed.
Anything less is confusion wearing authority’s voice.
And illegibility — no matter how it’s dressed — is not disobedience.