Making Room

It started with finishing another article.

I leaned back and realized that nearly everything I’d been writing lately had been pointing in the same direction—not toward answers, but toward people.

Every essay seemed to circle the same question in a different way: Why is it so hard to understand each other?

At first, I thought the answer was simple: we need more context. The more we know about someone’s experiences, the easier it becomes to understand why they see the world the way they do.

I still think that’s true. I just don’t think it’s the whole story.

Is context enough?

The more I reflected on the people in my own life, the more I noticed something.

Sometimes I had plenty of information. I knew what they had been through. I knew what they valued. I even understood why they reacted the way they did.

And yet... I still wasn’t really seeing them.

Without realizing it, I kept measuring their experiences against my own. I understood their story, but I was still reading it through my perspective.

The space between us

That made me wonder if understanding someone requires something more than curiosity.

Maybe it requires space:

• Space for another person to exist without immediately comparing them to ourselves.

• Space to let their wants, fears, and priorities be different from ours.

• Space to admit that what feels obvious to me might not feel obvious to them.

Not because either of us is wrong, but because we’re living from entirely different experiences.

Seeing someone for the first time

Lately, I’ve been wondering if this is what people mean when they talk about feeling seen.

Maybe being seen isn’t someone agreeing with us. Maybe it’s someone becoming curious enough to stop assuming we’re just another version of themselves.

It means letting us be different. It means letting our experiences make sense before deciding whether they would have made the same choices.

That feels much harder than simply listening. It asks us to loosen our grip on our own perspective, if only for a moment.

It starts with ourselves

The more I think about it, the more I wonder if understanding another person begins with understanding ourselves.

If I don’t recognize my own assumptions, how can I tell the difference between what’s true about someone else and what’s simply familiar to me?

Maybe that’s why this has been harder than I expected: seeing another person isn’t only about discovering who they are. It’s also about noticing how often I quietly replace their reality with my own.

Making room

I don’t think I’ll ever understand another person completely. There will always be parts of their experience that I’ll never live firsthand.

But maybe complete understanding was never the goal. Maybe the goal is simpler:

To make enough room that another person can be fully themselves in front of me—not the version that makes sense to me, not the version I wish they were, but simply them.

And maybe that’s where understanding begins.