edited to add:

“O wad some power the giftie gie us
to see oursels as ithers see us
It would frae many a blunder free us
And foolish notion.” — Robert Burns

How is it that you can live or work or whatever side by side with someone or several someones, encounter and undergo the same things at the same time, hear and participate in the same conversations and activities, feel like-minded, and yet what you take away as your experience is so uniquely personal that when you hear or see that seemingly shared situation described by someone else it is as if things happened on different planets.

What hits me and my memory of what was said, felt, observed, does not line up with what someone else processed.

It shakes me to the heart when I am brought up short on such things, especially when the non-connecting lines are with someone I am close with.

It doesn’t change the validity of what either of us “know” from the shared time, and neither of us is wrong. It just breaks up the mirror I look at for seeing myself.

It reminds me that we are all going through life alone on our separate tracks, blessed when the tracks come close together and we can reach out and touch each other with encouragement.

We all have images of ourselves, right or wrong, inflated or deflated, but these are what we are familiar with and are our base. We know who we are as the lead character in OUR movie. But when you see the exceedingly different supporting or peripheral role you play in someone else’s story, you realize that they are without the benefit of all the wonderful, deep, compassionate, witty, sparkly depths you play in your own, and they obviously aren’t really paying attention to who YOU are — just as perhaps you didn’t catch the same multi-faceted breadth to the roles they are playing for themselves.

There’s just no way we can really pay that much attention to each other.

And we can’t be the star of someone else’s movie.

And you can be in the same place at the same time, hearing and encountering and undergoing the same things, having the same conversation, and yet your experience, your memory, your grasp of what went on will be unique, separate, apart, alone, yours only.

And it can hurt.