After twenty years of sitting with people on some of their hardest days and having many of my own, there’s one thing I keep coming back to. We are far more alike than we are different.
On the surface, our lives look nothing alike. We have different jobs, families, histories and beliefs. But when something hard arrives, the differences seem to thin out, and what’s left looks remarkably similar.
Sooner or later, it finds us
Nobody gets through a life untouched. At some point there’s a loss, a diagnosis, an ending, a failure, a betrayal, or a stretch of time where the ground simply isn’t steady. It might be loud and sudden, or slow and quiet. It might be the loss of a person, or a job, or a version of the future you’d been quietly counting on.
We don’t get to choose whether this happens. We only get to find out how we meet it. And that, I think, is where we find our common ground.
What we do next
In the days and months after something hard, people do surprisingly similar things. We try to cope. We try to settle our bodies and quiet our minds. We keep busy, or we withdraw. We talk, or we go silent. We go over it again and again, looking for a reason or a way it could have gone differently. We try to feel less, or we try to feel anything at all.
None of these are signs of weakness. They’re the ordinary, human ways of trying to get through. Some help for a while, some stop helping, and most of us use a mix without noticing.
What strikes me is how familiar it all is. The 3am thoughts, the heaviness in the chest, the odd moment of laughter that feels almost out of place, the sudden wave in the supermarket. Different people, different circumstances, the same human shape.
The loneliness of thinking you’re the only one
Here’s what I find quietly sad, and also quietly hopeful. When we’re struggling, we tend to assume everyone else is coping better. We look around and see people who seem fine, and we conclude that something must be wrong with us.
But those people are, very often, managing something of their own. Most of what we carry is invisible. We rarely see the inside of anyone’s struggle, only the edited outside.
Knowing that suffering is shared doesn’t make it smaller. A loss is still a loss. But it can change the story we tell about ourselves. It’s one thing to hurt and think “what’s wrong with me?” It’s quite another to hurt and think “this is what it is to be a person.”
Not fixing, just noticing
I don’t think this needs to be tied up neatly. There’s no lesson that makes pain worthwhile, and nobody has to find the silver lining on a schedule. Sometimes things are simply hard, and the work is to let them be hard without adding a layer of judgement about how we’re handling it.
In my work, I draw a lot on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), which starts from a similar place: pain is a normal part of being alive, and the aim isn’t to eliminate it but to change how we relate to it. We can make room for what we feel, stay close to what matters to us, and keep taking small steps, even when things are heavy.
A thought to take with you
If you’re in a hard stretch right now, you’re in very old company. People have been losing, grieving, doubting and carrying on for as long as there have been people. That doesn’t ask you to feel any particular way about it. It’s just a quiet reminder that you’re not the only one at the table.
We see adults at my practice in Varsity Lakes on the Gold Coast, and I offer telehealth appointments to people anywhere in Australia. You’re welcome to book a session or get in touch. If you’re finding things overwhelming right now, Lifeline is available on 13 11 14, any time.
If this reflection resonated, you might also like my posts on anxiety and ACT and conflict avoidance in relationships.
This article is general information only and isn’t a substitute for individual professional advice.
