The Publish Button
I stare at the publish button more than I should.
Not because the writing is not ready. Not because the argument is weak. Not because I am unsure of what I think. I stare at it because I know what happens next. The thing I wrote — the honest thing, the vulnerable thing, the thing I actually believe — gets dropped into a room full of people who have already picked sides. And the room does not evaluate the idea. The room sorts it. Whose team does this argument belong to? Which camp gets to claim it? Which camp gets to attack it?
That is the part that stops me.
The Sorting Machine
We have built a culture that runs on binary classification. Left or right. For or against. Us or them. Every opinion gets fed through the sorting machine, and the machine only has two output bins. There is no third bin. There is no "it is complicated" bin. There is no "I see merit on both sides and I do not think this is a simple question" bin.
If you do not land cleanly in one bin, both sides treat you like a defector. You are too conservative for the progressives. Too progressive for the conservatives. Too empathetic for the rationalists. Too analytical for the empaths. You are not neutral — you are suspect. Because in a tribal system, the person who will not pick a side is more threatening than the person on the other side. At least the enemy is predictable.
The person in the middle is unreadable. And unreadable is dangerous.
Purple
I tend to be purple. Not as a political identity. As a cognitive default. I see the structure of arguments before I see the conclusion. I can track the internal logic of a position I disagree with. I can hold two competing frameworks in my head and understand why each one makes sense to the person inside it.
People say autistic people cannot do this. That we lack theory of mind. That we cannot perspective-take. I have heard that my entire life, and it has never matched my experience. I do not struggle to see other perspectives. I struggle to stop seeing them. The pattern recognition that comes with this wiring does not shut off when the pattern is a human belief system. I can see why someone on the left believes what they believe. I can see why someone on the right believes what they believe. I can see the fear underneath both positions, the values driving both positions, the lived experience that shaped both positions.
And I can see how neither one is the whole picture.
That does not make me enlightened. It makes me homeless. Because there is no camp for the person who keeps saying "yes, but also." There is no tribe for the person who refuses to flatten a complex issue into a slogan. Someone said it recently and it stuck with me: they were being punished because they would not take a side. Not disagreed with. Punished.
The Real Fear
Here is what I thought the fear was: disapproval. Rejection. The cringe of putting something honest into the world and having people decide you are wrong, or naive, or too much.
That is not the real fear.
The real fear is the potential. Not that division has happened — but that it could. That by putting my perspective out there — this purple, neither-camp, sees-both-sides perspective — I do not build a bridge. I become a fault line. That my words become the thing people split over instead of the thing people think about. That I contribute to the fracturing instead of the understanding.
It is not even the certainty that it will happen. It is the possibility. The anticipation of it. The running simulation in my head where I publish the honest thing and watch the room crack down the middle — not because of what I said, but because the room was already cracked and my words just gave people a new line to stand on either side of.
That is the vulnerability I did not expect. Not "what if they reject me?" but "what if I make it worse?"
The Tribalism Trap
The thing about tribalism is that it does not feel like tribalism from the inside. It feels like clarity. It feels like knowing what is right and recognizing who is wrong. It feels like community. The sorting is invisible to the sorted.
But from the outside — from purple, from the middle, from the no man's land between entrenched positions — you can see the machinery. You can see how the same information gets interpreted differently depending on which camp receives it. You can see how the camps are not really arguing about the issue anymore. They are arguing about identity. About belonging. About who gets to be the good guys.
And you can see how the person who points this out gets shot at from both sides. Because the one thing the camps agree on is that the middle is not a real position. The middle is cowardice. The middle is fence-sitting. The middle is privilege — the luxury of not having to choose.
Except it is not a luxury. It is a cost. The cost of seeing more than you are supposed to see. The cost of not being able to simplify what is not simple. The cost of being the kind of brain that cannot stop pattern-matching long enough to just pick a side and relax.
The Cringe
There is a specific kind of shame that comes with this fear. It is not the shame of being wrong. It is the shame of being potentially divisive. Of being a person who — despite wanting desperately to connect, to build understanding, to say the thing that helps — might actually be making the divide wider just by speaking.
And the cringe. The physical, full-body cringe of imagining the moment someone reads your words and decides you are the enemy. Not because you are on the other side. But because you refused to be on their side. That is a different kind of rejection. It is not "you are wrong." It is "you are disloyal."
For someone who already struggles to read the room — who already runs the social computation on manual instead of automatic — that threat is paralyzing. Because I cannot predict which version of the room I am walking into. I cannot tell in advance whether this particular honest thought is going to land as insight or as betrayal. The lookup table for "what will offend whom" is infinite, constantly updating, and I do not have passive access to it.
So I stare at the publish button. Not because I am afraid of being wrong. Because I am afraid of what being honest might cost the room.
Why I Hit It Anyway
Because the alternative is silence. And silence in the middle is not neutrality. It is erasure. If the only voices in the conversation are the ones that have already picked sides, then the conversation itself becomes binary. The purple disappears. The nuance disappears. The possibility that two things can be true at the same time disappears.
And that is a worse kind of division than anything I could write.
I would rather be the fault line people argue about than the silence that lets the binary harden. I would rather say the complicated thing and get shot at from both sides than let the room collapse into two walls facing each other with nothing in between.
The fear is real. The cringe is real. The possibility that my words divide more than they unite — that is real too. But the certainty that saying nothing changes nothing is worse.
The Protocol: The fear of vulnerability is not the fear of being judged. It is the fear that your words become the fault line — that by being honest, you give the room a new place to split. But silence in the middle does not prevent the fracture. It just removes the bridge. Being purple in a binary world means accepting that some people will call you a coward for not choosing a side. Say the complicated thing anyway. The room does not need another wall. It needs the space between them.
