Kindness as Repudiation

The TikTok comment stung: “Your kindness is just fawning/a trauma response.”

I’d been discussing staying kind despite systemic harm and trauma.

They weren’t entirely wrong. That’s what hurt, and that’s what made me think.

The Braided Origin

My kindness didn’t begin as trauma response - it was temperamentally part of how I moved through the world. I learned early that kindness was also the safest option. When you’re autistic and can’t predict neurotypical reactions, warmth and softness create buffers.

Fawning became part of my self-protection. My natural kindness got recruited by my nervous system - not consciously, not manipulatively, but in the way a body learns what keeps it safe. Not just trauma response, not just personality - but personality that my nervous system discovered had survival value and leaned into without asking me first.

The kindness was native. The fawning was learned. They braided together so early I couldn’t separate the strands for decades.

The Architecture They Couldn’t See

The comment revealed a lack of imagination about how kindness evolves. In their framework, only two options existed:

Kindness from innocence - you’re soft because you haven’t been hurt yet. The untouched staying gentle because they don’t know better.

Kindness as dysfunction - you’re soft because trauma broke your ability to self-protect. This reads as pathology, fawning response, and trauma bonding.

Missing entirely: kindness as conscious architecture built from both and neither.

I know exactly what violence tastes like and how it moves through systems.

Knowing this, I choose kindness. Not from ignorance. Not from dysfunction. From precise understanding of what I’m refusing to replicate.

The Evolution as Political Choice

Here’s what that TikTok commenter couldn’t grasp: kindness can evolve without disappearing. I can now see both the genuine warmth AND the way my nervous system recruited that warmth for safety. My fawning has resolved. What remains is choice: I can be warm because that’s who I am, with full consciousness of what I’m doing and why.

This isn’t the same as “choosing to be kind despite trauma.” That frame suggests kindness exists separately, maintained intact through hardship. My kindness is informed BY trauma and shaped by it. It exists as it does because I know exactly what violence does. My gentleness is informed refusal.