what it means to be human.
The interesting thing about suffering is when we do, our minds trick us into believing that we are alone and isolated; that no one else could ever feel this way. We make islands out of heartbreak and wonder how we will ever come back home.
You have been there. We all have been there.
As living, breathing creatures, we share the experience of what it means to move through life and be impacted by the world around us. Our individual moments of suffering belong uniquely to us and yet we all know what it means to hurt. We have all felt the human struggle of feeling isolated after moving to a new state, starting a new job, or the awkwardness of walking into a new place and having this sense that you don't belong. Of having our minds begin to play tricks on us when no one accepts our attempt at connection and we are left feeling completely alone. We all share the experience of growing up with implicit standards of beauty and at some point in our lives, perhaps struggle with our self-worth after gaining weight, aging, or not measuring up to these perceived ideals. And because we are human, we all will lose the people that loved us more than anyone else ever could. We will all come to know what it feels like to sit in the dark on a bed, not knowing how to fill what's been lost and wonder what it would mean to ever feel whole or happy again. We come back from war, but don't ever feel at home. We feel the sting of not being able to bring into the world the child we've always hoped to create. We keep doing things that hurt us as our best attempt to feel better. We feel desperate for love and unworthy of receiving it. Part of walking this earth means that will we all experience the joy of a child's laughter, the comfort in a gentle hug, and the feeling of magic while watching a magnificent sunset. It means that we all will navigate discomfort and feelings of inadequacy when our best efforts fall short. We all will experience our darkest days and sit in the depths of our greatest flaws. Without exception, we will all make decisions we wish we hadn't, and our hearts will break.
I want to remind you of this because at any given moment, one of us are experiencing the pain of what it means to be human.
As a therapist, I have the privilege of sitting with people in their deepest hurts. And as a collector of stories, what I have come to know is that we all have the same experience of sadness, loss, and disappointment. Although our individual stories are different, our suffering is the same. Pain is both personal and impersonal; unique to us and universally experienced. We all want to be loved deeply and connected in ways that feel supportive and safe- from a person experiencing homelessness, to the person fleeing their country in search of safety, to the senior in high school who is getting ready to leave home for college, to the woman who wasn't given the choice to consent. And to you, the person reading this, who has overcome challenges of your own. You are not alone. This isn't about comparing each other's pain and invalidating our own difficulties, this about acknowledging our humanness. This is about allowing ourselves to connect to another person because we all need it so deeply. This about learning to hold each other in compassion; to use our arms as an extension of our hearts and connect to someone who is hurting.
The world I want to live in is the one in which we pay attention to each other. Where we see each other hurting and walk over so that no one has to sit in sadness alone. The world I want to live in is one where we recognize that what unites us is stronger than what divides us. This is your gentle reminder that it is our responsibility to recognize the humanity in each other. The world I want to live in is the one where no one hurts alone.
Be a bridge.