What people carry…

I shared this quote yesterday.

“A moment of awareness that someone you’ve known for years still has a private and mysterious inner life, and somewhere in the hallways of their personality is a door locked from the inside, a stairway leading to a wing of the house that you’ve never fully explored.”

John Koenig, on the word “gnosienne” from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

It made me reflect on how most of us walk around assuming we know people. Not everything about them, obviously, but enough to think we can read them.

Then every now and then you catch a glimpse of something and realise there’s a whole side of this person you’ve never seen before. An entire inner world that existed long before you came along.

Sometimes I think about how complicated I am. The things I’ve lived through. The people I’ve loved, the things I’ve lost. The things I still carry, the conversations I replay. The old graves I occasionally wander through.

And then I realise everyone else is carrying their own version of that too.

Things they’re proud and ashamed of. People they miss and don’t miss. The things they regret and the things they’d do again. The version of themselves they show the world and the version that only comes out at 2am when they can’t sleep.

You’d never know from looking at them, because I think most people become really good at carrying it.

The neighbour, the shop assistant, the friend, the partner, the person in the comments section. We think we know them, but we’re really only seeing a few rooms in a very large house.

We are all these ridiculously complicated beings, yet life still requires us to empty the dishwasher. To remember the milk, put the kettle on, answer emails, walk the dog.

It’s strange when you think about it. All these vast inner worlds quietly going about their day.

I used to think I could read people, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve realised that’s not really the case. Mainly because I understand how much of them I’ll never know.

The quote’s image of a locked door in the hallway of someone’s personality is a good analogy, because I don’t think those doors are always locked against other people. Sometimes they’re locked because even we choose not to go in there very often. When I think about it, there are parts of myself that I rarely share with anyone. So Why should or would I expect other people to be any different?