Not to Be Understood, but to Help Others Understand Themselves

Most of us spend a surprising amount of our lives rehearsing explanations.

We explain why we stayed, why we left, why we changed our minds, why something hurts more than it should, or why we've stopped being the person someone remembers. We do this even when we aren't likely to say any of it out loud. We organize the information, collect the facts and the context, and we imagine a moment when someone has drawn close enough to hear it all. They will see clearly, we tell ourselves, and then they'll understand.

It's not that we want shallow explanations. We want to feel understood. We want someone to see and recognize us as we know ourselves to be. It's a particular type of reassurance, but it's no less powerful for being rare. We're never entirely ourselves in someone else's eyes, not until we've been recognized as such.

But understanding is never easy to come by. It has to pass through someone else's life before it reaches us, and all of us are living in the aftermath of something they've experienced, feared, or thought to be true. We can deliver the truth to them, but we can't control what they do with it. We can present every fact and follow every thread but still arrive at something that has little to do with the life we remember.

For a very long time, I believed that understanding could be achieved through better explanations. I assumed that if I could just arrange the information more effectively, someone would see things my way, or at least as clearly as I do.

It was hard work to realize I was trying to control something I could not. I could be truthful, but not decisive. I could deliver context, but not override the version of me someone else preferred. The more I tried to be understood, the more I found my life up for debate. And it exhausted me. The effort I was putting in was too great for the rewards I received, and I wondered if it was all worth it. Was my life truly some kind of mystery, or was I just trying too hard to solve it?

Instead of asking how I could help others understand me, I started asking if I understood myself.

The difference is not as small as you might think. It is far more difficult to accept the truth when it comes, but it is also rarely as burdensome to demand. One is conditional on the other being fulfilled, but both are undeniably necessary

I had started writing as a means of coping with a loss I didn't think I could explain. I wasn't trying to produce anything of worth or move toward any particular goal, like becoming a published author or creating a body of work. I just wanted to make the shape of what had occurred more familiar to me, to make it something I could live alongside, rather than something that had altered the texture of my days forever

For a long time, I thought I'd been writing about what occurred. I believed I was describing a loss, a grief, a memory, and a love affair that had defined a portion of my life

but as I wrote, I realized something was wrong. The facts didn't feel nearly as important as what occurred to me as I wrote through them. And so I asked myself questions I hadn't previously. What was it that happened to me? What did it want of me? What did I want of it? What had changed? What had it changed?

Writing did not make my loss any smaller. It made the thing itself more legible. There is an important difference, which is that coping often happens when we make meaning of the thing, but understanding asks us to stay with it long enough to discover what it has made of us. It is less about turning suffering or loss into lessons and more about accepting that something can continue to transform us long after it has transpired. I was not done being made, and writing was going to help me see it

I thought I was writing because I loved Rocket, but that was not the whole story. I was writing because love had made me newly aware of responsibility, and grief had made me newly aware of its limits. In losing him, I was seeing how terribly I had wanted to be loved, and in grieving, I was seeing how little I'd wanted to accept it. I was not writing about being devasted; I was writing about what devastation had asked of me, and what I had asked in return. It was not the story I thought I was telling myself, but it was the one I needed to hear. I did not know it when I began, but I grew to understand it better with every word

Perhaps we are due such discoveries, and perhaps stories are due to us in return. They do not just preserve facts or keep them safe. They give us distance from them so we can stop confusing what happened for what it meant. Two people can experience something very similar, but if they are profoundly different in other ways, they are likely to interpret it in different ways as well. Not only can one person not understand another's life, but another person's grief may not understand your own

This is why being understood by someone else cannot be the same as understanding ourselves. Someone may recognize the sadness and the unfairness and even the strength it has taken to live alongside this loss, but they cannot tell us what it has made of us. They may admire us from a distance and still fail to see what we are trying to see in ourselves. Sympathy can accompany us, but it cannot complete us

There is also an unintended cost to seeking understanding as a means of coping. When we begin to believe too deeply that our grief is an explanation of itself, it can become difficult to leave it behind. We can repeat the same story because it feels true, and it does matter, but we forget why we began telling it in the first place. We confuse understanding for something else entirely. Understanding is not about staying loyal to the truth, even when it hurts. It is about outgrowing the pain and moving toward something new and unfamiliar. We can fall in love with our grief because it understands us, but grief is also frequently a form of self-protection. We protect ourselves from other things by convincing ourselves that the grief is more important than it is. We can stay in places and situations that are holding us back because we think we need the unhappiness to ground us. We can mistake our willingness to endure for wisdom, our willingness to last for strength, and our willingness to continue for faith.

Understanding yourself does not ask you to fall in love with everything you've been through, but it often asks you to see clearly what you've mistaken for something else

As I continued to write, I began to see that all the things I thought of as different were frequently asking me the same questions. How did my grief make me more aware of myself? How did my sadness affect what I wanted? What was this loss asking of me, and could I recognize it? What did I want to be responsible for, and what did I want to be forgiven for? In asking myself these different questions, I was learning different things about myself and my life. But I was also learning a great deal about how my grief had changed me. Losses, kindnesses, failures, and the many things I thought of as separate were all informing myself, and I was informing them in return

It was this, in part, that led me to create KCK, but not because I felt the need to create something for my philosophy to live in. The words kindness, courage, and knowledge were things I had discovered in myself, and in recognizing them, I understood that none of them could be shared in any particular way. A story cannot tell us what our life means, but it can help us pay attention to it, find language for what it requires of us, and recognize unfamiliar questions when they ask us for something we don't yet understand.

It was this as well that began to free me from my desire to be understood by others. I no longer felt that writing had to be something that explained me to someone else, or that I had to be understood for something I wanted to be known for. The details could be mine, but the recognition did not have to be. Someone could not understand me, but I could still be able to see something in my story that helped them see something in their own

This is, perhaps, the difference between confession and art. The first demands to be witnessed, while the second asks what you can see in return

The most lasting stories are rarely those that leave you feeling like you've understood someone better. They leave you feeling like you recognize yourself, which is a far more precarious position to be in, but also one that is infinitely more rewarding

The next time you hear a familiar story, ask yourself if you've been changed by it in any way. What parts of yourself do you see in the person telling it? What patterns of your own life do you think might be similar? What has this story revealed you to be, beyond what you previously knew?

The story acts as a mirror, but we are the ones who select what we want to see, and we are the ones who have to live with it afterwards

This is how my desire to be understood by someone else has begun to change. I can still feel frustrated when people do not understand me, and I can still feel like a version of myself is being wasted on people who do not want to listen. But I can also understand that I have been trying to do too much, to control something I should not have tried to control. I no longer feel like being misunderstood is a particular type of failure, and I think this may be one of the most liberating things about coming to terms with who you are. Your life is no less important because someone else does not understand it, but it is far more difficult to live under the constant pressure of someone else believing they need to understand it first

We can always be better at explaining ourselves to others. We can always demand better explanations of them. We can always feel like something valuable is being lost whenever someone misunderstands us. But underneath it all, there is usually something more familiar, and it often has to do with being honest with yourself. Do I know what this meant to me? Do I recognize what it has made of me? Can I live up to what it has asked of me, even if I am the only person who understands it? These are far more difficult questions, but they tend to be the ones that matter most in the long run

I used to think that one day I would run out of stories to tell and that there would be nothing left for me to say, since there are only so many defining moments in a single lifetime. I thought I would have written through most of them or at least remembered them in such a way that they would feel finished. But it has not been the events themselves that I have needed to write down, but rather their changing meanings. The same memories have taught me different things at different points in my life, and they continue to do so. The loss that hurt terribly at first has, in time, come to feel less like a severance of something I wanted and more like an acquisition. The things that once seemed like failures have begun to feel like transitions, the things I once thought of as mistakes have begun to feel like invitations. My life may be running out of events, but it certainly has not run out of meaning. I think this may be the reason I continue to write. Not to finish my life or to explain it to anyone in particular, but because attention has the power to change things. What I thought of as memory can become recognition. What I thought of as an ending can become a responsibility. What I thought of as something that occurred only to me can become a question someone else was not aware they needed answered

Being understood is a wonderful thing when it occurs, but I think it always has to be balanced with the opportunity to understand something yourself. Perhaps truth-telling is ultimately not about being understood by anyone at all, but about being in a position to understand what your life has tried to teach you.