There is something strange about being a person.
We spend our entire lives inside one mind, seeing the world through one set of eyes. Our memories shape what we believe, our experiences influence what we fear, and the things we’ve lived through become the foundation for how we understand everything else. Eventually, we develop an understanding of life that feels so natural to us that we forget it is only one way of seeing it.
Somewhere along the way, we begin to mistake our perspective for the world itself.
But outside the boundaries of our own minds, billions of other realities are unfolding. People with different histories, different definitions of happiness, different ideas of what makes a life worth living. People shaped by circumstances we cannot imagine, who see things we overlook, who find meaning in places we would never think to look.
All of us are moving through the same world, yet none of us are experiencing quite the same one.
There is a person walking past you whose entire life would be unrecognizable to you. They have memories you could never recreate, relationships you will never understand, and a collection of moments that have quietly determined the person they are today. They have been loved, misunderstood, disappointed, surprised, and changed. They have lived through entire chapters of their lives that no one standing beside them could ever identify.
Their life is as vast from the inside as yours is from within your own.
We move through the world surrounded by people whose inner lives remain almost entirely invisible to us. We recognize faces, learn names, develop impressions, and assign meaning to the little pieces of people we encounter. We become familiar with the surface of someone without ever coming close to understanding the entirety of who they are.
A stranger becomes a stranger because we have no context for their existence. We see them at one particular point in their life, and that brief encounter becomes the entirety of what we know. Meanwhile, they return to a life that existed long before we entered it and will continue long after we leave.
There is so much more to a person than what another person gets to witness.
Perhaps this is one of the strangest parts of being human. We are each the most familiar person in our own lives, yet we remain largely unfamiliar to everyone else.
We know the context behind our decisions. We remember the things that made us who we are. But when we encounter those same contradictions in other people, we rarely have the same patience. We see a decision without knowing what preceded it, a belief without knowing what gave rise to it, a reaction without understanding what it touched.
We judge the visible parts of people against the invisible parts of ourselves.
And in doing so, we sometimes mistake a lack of understanding for a lack of similarity.
The circumstances surrounding a heartbreak may differ beyond comparison, yet the feeling of having to rearrange your life around an absence is something another person might recognize. One person’s uncertainty comes from standing at the beginning of a new life, while another’s comes from realizing the life they built no longer fits.
Their stories have nothing in common on the surface, yet somewhere beneath them exists the familiar discomfort of not knowing what comes next.
The same feeling can take a thousand different forms.
We tend to recognize ourselves in people whose lives resemble our own. Similar backgrounds, similar interests, similar experiences. But there is something much more interesting about the similarities between people who appear to have nothing in common.
The person whose beliefs challenge yours has still spent a lifetime trying to make sense of the world. The person whose choices you cannot understand has still been shaped by experiences you have never known. The person whose life looks nothing like the one you imagined for yourself has still had to decide what to do with the time they were given.
Different lives. Different circumstances. Different conclusions.
Yet all of us are working with the same fundamental limitations. We cannot know everything. We cannot experience every possible life. We are making sense of an enormous world with the small, incomplete collection of experiences available to us.
None of us have the complete picture. We only have our piece of it.
Perhaps that is why the differences between us can seem so much larger than they really are. We mistake the boundaries of our own experiences for the boundaries of what is possible. Because we have never felt something, we assume it must be foreign. Because we have never lived a particular life, we struggle to imagine what it means to the person living it.
But the world is full of experiences that are unfamiliar in their details and familiar in their meaning.
Sometimes, we recognize ourselves in people we have almost nothing in common with. Someone we’ve known for five minutes articulates a feeling we’ve carried for years. A story that has nothing to do with our circumstances somehow makes sense of something we’ve struggled to understand about ourselves.
It is a reminder that our lives are individual, but the experience of living is not entirely our own.
We have all arrived in this world without knowing what to do with it. None of us were born understanding how to navigate relationships, make decisions, deal with loss, or determine what kind of person we wanted to become. We learned through experience, through watching others, through making mistakes and living long enough to see some of our assumptions change.
We are all interpreting life as we go, carrying forward what we have learned and trying to make sense of what we haven’t.
And then there is the extraordinary fact that every person we encounter is temporary in our lives, even when they are permanent in their own.
We meet people at particular moments in their existence and carry an impression of them forward. We remember who they were when we knew them, sometimes without realizing how much they have changed since. Our understanding of people is always incomplete, not simply because there is so much we do not know, but because there is so much about them that has not happened yet.
The same is true of ourselves.
We are not finished people observing a finished world. We are unfinished people observing one another, each changing in ways we cannot fully anticipate, each becoming someone the people who know us today may not entirely recognize tomorrow.
There is something humbling about that.
It makes the world feel both impossibly large and strangely intimate. Every person is a universe of their own, yet none of us exists entirely apart from the experiences that connect us. We are separate lives, moving in different directions, carrying different histories, and still finding pieces of our own existence reflected in people we could never have imagined understanding.
You’ll never know the full story of most of the people you meet. You’ll never know what they were like as children, what keeps them awake at night, or what they’re quietly hoping their future will hold.
But somewhere in all the things you’ll never know about them, there is probably something you would understand.
Something you’ve felt. Something you’ve wondered. Something you’ve carried, too.
There is an entire world inside everyone.
We spend our lives looking out from within our own, sometimes forgetting that the people standing beside us are doing exactly the same thing. Each of us holding a perspective that feels like the whole world, each of us carrying a story that feels entirely our own.
And somewhere, in all those separate worlds, we keep encountering the same feelings, the same uncertainties, the same little pieces of what it means to be alive.
We are not living the same lives.
We are simply finding our way through the same extraordinary thing.
With love,
Emi Sue
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