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There are moments in our lives that teach us things we don’t fully understand until years later.
After writing my last piece, I found myself thinking less about the controversy itself and more about what the reaction revealed about how quickly we decide we know someone else’s story.
One of those lessons happened for me years ago, when I found myself sitting in a courtroom.
I remember looking around and realizing that certain people had already formed an opinion of who I was.
They were seeing me through a lens that had already been shaped for them, a version of me that seemed to exist before they had heard everything I had to say.
And I remember thinking:
You don’t know me.
You don’t know the conversations that happened behind closed doors.
You don’t know what I was told.
You don’t know what I understood to be true.
You don’t know the years of history that brought me there.
What stayed with me wasn’t that people saw things differently than I did. People are allowed to have different perspectives.
It was the certainty. The certainty that a piece of the story was the whole story.
I think about that experience often because it taught me something I now see everywhere:
Two things can be true at the same time.
A Moment Can Be True Without Being The Whole Truth
There was another lesson I learned long before I ever sat in that courtroom:
A picture can be completely truthful and still be incomplete.
I remember seeing photographs of an untidy kitchen, piles of children’s clothes waiting to be sorted, toys scattered around a room, or simply the evidence of a home being lived in by two young children.
Those things were real.
The mess was real.
But they were never the whole story.
A photograph doesn’t show what happened earlier that day. It doesn’t show what someone had already accomplished, what they were trying to do, how much sleep they had gotten, or what they were carrying emotionally.
I’ve also experienced what it feels like to have a reaction captured in a moment without the context that came before it.
What someone else could see was a moment.
What I was living was a much larger story.
That experience taught me something I wish more of us remembered before judging someone from the outside:
A moment can be real without being the whole truth.
And isn’t that what we do online all the time?
We see the photograph.
We watch the thirty-second clip.
We read the comment.
We see someone’s reaction.
And we think we’ve been given the story.
But often, we’ve only been given a frame.
We judge the frame while believing we’ve seen the whole picture.
Our Experiences Matter, But They Aren’t Universal
In 2016, my family lost a family member to suicide.
We knew he was struggling.
We knew he was hurting.
But we didn’t know what was going to happen.
Looking back, it’s easy to connect the dots.
It’s easy to think we should have known more, done more, or understood more.
But knowing someone is struggling and knowing exactly what is going to happen next are not the same thing.
That experience has stayed with me.
I can wish I had understood more while also recognizing that I did not have the information I have now.
Both things can be true.
I think this is especially important when we talk about mental health and the assumptions we make about what someone “should” have done.
I recently found myself thinking about this after reading a conversation about postpartum mental illness. One woman shared her own experience and explained that when she was struggling, she made the decision to have someone else care for her babies.
I didn’t read her comment and think, Yes. That’s what everyone should do.
I thought, Someone else might need to hear this.
Maybe another mother needs to hear that she isn’t alone.
Maybe she’ll recognize that asking someone else to step in is an option.
Maybe she’ll realize she doesn’t have to carry everything by herself.
Maybe hearing another woman’s experience will help her make a different choice.
That is the value of sharing our experiences.
But there is another truth that can exist alongside it:
What was possible for one person in one moment may not be possible for someone else in another.
We are so quick to say what someone should or shouldn’t have done when we’re looking at their circumstances from the outside.
But unless we’ve lived inside that person’s mind, experienced what they were experiencing, and understood what was actually happening in that moment, we may not know what choices were available to them, or whether something that seems obvious to us was even an option.
There is a difference between saying: “This is what happened to me” and saying: “Because this is what happened to me, everyone else should have been capable of doing the same.”
Those are two different things.
Our experiences can teach us. Right or wrong.
They can give someone else hope.
They can help us recognize warning signs and make different choices.
But they don’t make our experience a universal instruction manual for everyone else.
Mental illness is extraordinarily complex.
People can experience similar symptoms in vastly different ways. Their awareness, judgment, support systems, histories, circumstances, and ability to seek help can all be different.
We cannot take one person’s capacity in one moment and use it as the measuring stick for another person in another moment.
And this isn’t unique to mental illness.
We do it with grief.
We do it with trauma.
We do it with parenting.
We do it with relationships.
We do it with almost anything we have personally survived.
We think, “I went through this, and this is what I did.”
And sometimes, without realizing it, that becomes, “Therefore, this is what you should have done.”
But that’s not empathy.
That’s comparison.
Two Truths Can Exist At The Same Time
This is where conversations like this so often go sideways.
If we try to understand someone’s behavior, people assume we’re defending it.
If we have compassion for someone, we’re accused of excusing them.
But understanding isn’t excusing.
Compassion doesn’t eliminate accountability.
Both can exist at the same time.
Someone can be hurting and still be responsible for how they treat other people.
Someone can deserve accountability and still deserve compassion.
Someone’s behavior can be unacceptable while their humanity remains intact.
We can say:
“That wasn’t okay.”
While also asking:
“What happened here?”
Those questions don’t cancel each other out.
In fact, I think we’re better off when we’re willing to ask both.
We Don’t Always Know What Is Happening Inside Someone Else
I think about this as a mother, too.
My children have taught me that people can experience and express emotions in different ways.
One person’s overwhelm might look like tears. Another person’s might look like silence.
Someone may need to talk.
Someone else may need to withdraw.
Some people know exactly what they’re feeling. Others don’t have words for it.
Sometimes we mistake someone’s inability to express an emotion in the way we expect for an absence of that emotion altogether.
We should be careful about that.
Because the way someone looks from the outside doesn’t necessarily tell us what is happening on the inside.
And someone else’s capacity is not automatically the same as ours simply because we’ve experienced something similar.
We Are So Quick To Fill In The Blanks
Maybe that’s what bothers me most about the way we talk to one another now.
We are given a handful of facts and immediately fill in everything we don’t know.
We hear someone’s story and compare it to our own.
We read one sentence and decide we know the person’s character.
We watch someone’s reaction and decide we know what they’re feeling.
And then we defend the story we’ve created as though we were actually there.
But we’re not.
We’re watching from the outside.
I’ve sat on the other side of that.
I know what it feels like to have people decide they understand you when they don’t.
I know what it feels like to have your story reduced to the pieces other people can see.
Perhaps that’s why I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with certainty when circumstances are complicated.
Not because I think we should stop asking questions.
Not because I think everyone deserves to be believed without examination.
And not because I think accountability should disappear.
But because I think there is tremendous wisdom in being able to say:
I don’t know.
I don’t know everything that happened.
I don’t know what was happening inside that person.
I don’t know what they understood.
I don’t know what circumstances were shaping that moment.
I don’t know what they were carrying.
And admitting that doesn’t make us weak.
It makes us honest.
Maybe We Need Less Certainty And More Curiosity
We don’t have to stop having difficult conversations.
We don’t have to agree with one another.
We don’t have to abandon our boundaries or our principles.
But perhaps we can approach complicated stories with a little more humility.
We can share our experiences without turning them into universal standards.
We can hold people accountable without dehumanizing them.
We can have compassion without excusing.
And we can disagree without assuming the person on the other side is stupid, evil, delusional, or part of some larger agenda.
Most importantly, we can remember that there is a human being behind the screen reading our words.
I learned something in that courtroom years ago that I think about often:
Being watched is not the same as being known.
Maybe that’s something worth remembering before we decide that we know someone else’s story.
I can disagree with you and still recognize your humanity.
I can believe something you did was wrong and still want to understand what brought you there.
I can listen to your experience without making it the standard by which I measure everyone else’s.
And I can admit that I don’t know the whole story.
Maybe that’s where compassion actually begins—not in agreement, and not in excusing, but in recognizing the limits of our own perspective.
We don’t have to understand every person, agree with everyone, or even like one another.
But if we’re going to speak about someone else’s life, perhaps we should remember that we are holding only a piece of it.
What if we don’t know the whole story?
Maybe that is the question worth asking before we decide we know someone else’s.
Because there is always more we don’t know.
And sometimes the most compassionate thing we can do is leave room for that.
Compassion will take us far farther than judgment ever will.
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