The Unwanted Mutation

 Natural selection doesn’t care. It isn’t personal. No gold stars for effort, no justice for the kind-hearted. It’s a filter with no emotion — keep what works, discard what doesn’t.

Families run the same way sometimes. Not with claws or camouflage, but with silence and favoritism. The ecosystem is social instead of biological. Adapt or be trimmed. And the adaptations aren’t wings or sharper teeth, they’re things like learning when to disappear, when to smile, when to never show the wound.

I was the wrong mutation. Too loud in the wrong ways, too quiet in the ways that mattered. The system didn’t know what to do with me, so it spit me out. Left me outside the circle, watching the others play roles they’d learned to perfection.

But here’s the paradox of survival: the mutation that doesn’t fit today might be the one that saves the species tomorrow. What looks like weakness under one sky can be the exact adaptation that keeps life breathing when the weather changes.

That thought haunts me, but it also steadies me. Because maybe the scars, the distance, the refusal to keep bending aren’t just damage. Maybe they’re adaptations. Strange ones, yes. Lonely ones, often. But real. And maybe survival isn’t about being the fittest. Maybe it’s about being the anomaly that keeps walking anyway.