It Felt So Obvious

It started with being annoyed.

I was lying in bed, trying to fall asleep, when I heard her voice from the other room. She was on the phone.

At first, it was quiet. Then, little by little, her voice got louder. The more excited she became, the louder she talked.

I remember thinking: “She knows I’m trying to sleep.”

The annoyance felt obvious. But almost immediately, another thought crossed my mind: She wasn’t doing it to bother me. She was simply doing what made sense from where she was standing.

She was caught up in the conversation. In that moment, being excited was simply more real to her than someone sleeping in the next room.

And then I realized I’d done something remarkably similar just a few nights earlier.

When something feels true

I had just finished watching a movie that completely overwhelmed me. It left me emotional in a way I hadn’t experienced in a long time.

For a moment, I found myself thinking: “How could someone not feel this?”

The feeling was so strong that it almost seemed universal. But it wasn’t. It was universal to me—and there’s an important difference.

The view from the inside

The more I thought about it, the more I wondered if this happens all the time. Not because people are selfish, but because we only experience life from the inside.

When something feels incredibly important to us, it’s easy to assume other people are seeing the exact same thing:

• The excited person assumes everyone understands their excitement.

• The exhausted person assumes everyone notices how tired they are.

• The person who feels ignored assumes everyone can see the distance.

• The person who’s finally understood assumes everyone must want that same feeling.

None of those experiences are wrong. They’re simply incomplete.

Different worlds, same reality

I used to think misunderstandings happened mostly because people didn’t care enough. Now I’m starting to think another possibility is just as common:

We’re each responding to realities that feel completely obvious from our own perspective.

Not because they’re objectively true, but because they’re the realities we’re living.

That doesn’t make us bad. It makes us human.

Looking beyond our own experience

One thing I’ve been learning is that strong feelings can quietly narrow our perspective. Not intentionally—just naturally. The stronger something feels, the easier it is to believe it should be obvious to everyone else.

Maybe that’s why understanding another person is so difficult.

It isn’t just about listening. It’s about remembering that what feels undeniable to me might be almost invisible to someone else—and the reverse is probably true, too.

Maybe understanding doesn’t begin when two people finally agree.

Maybe it begins the moment each person realizes the other has been living inside a completely different reality all along.