I remember telling a story to one of my supervisors at work. It was a story that I haven’t shared in a while; I rarely talk about my personal life, especially after working in many toxic environments. 

Then one day, I decided to open up and share the story of my termination with this specific supervisor. They were surprised by the whole story and said: 

“Damn, you went through a lot at that place.”

I was surprised by these words. Although the termination affected me to an extent, I somehow never felt deeply affected. So, I replied: “Well, that wasn’t the only thing in life that has affected me.” 

They then looked at me shocked and said: 

“I would have never known you went through a lot. You carry yourself so well, but then at the same time…” long pause, “You have so many hidden layers of your personality.”

As soon as I heard that, I asked myself if many of us had a similar reaction whenever we heard an unexpected story from someone, especially one that has negatively affected another person’s life. 

Then I noticed that many of us rarely hear such vulnerable stories unless the stories are from the news. It’s mainly because being vulnerable is difficult, especially in a society emphasizing accomplishments and accolades. To seem successful, many of us would only talk about our achievements and rewards instead of sharing moments that may have strengthened our characters.

Therefore, when we interact with someone, even if it’s our friends or family, we use something similar to a conversation filter. Like social media filters, we try to filter out the negative events in our lives whenever we talk with others. We share the positive since we feel more comfortable with the good news. 

However, most of these negative life events have taught us valuable lessons. Without them, we would have never become the way we are, and we would have never learned the importance of resilience.

So, will people ever know what we went through and learned to become who we are if we always hide all the negative life moments? 

Because we constantly avoid negative thoughts and discuss more positive experiences, many of us have a preconceived notion of a person going through hardships. However, we need to change this because these thoughts create bias. As a result, we assume that someone who has a job and seems content hasn’t experienced any turmoil in life.

But this type of thinking is often shallow. We fail to take into account many aspects of every individual. For someone to open up about these different aspects of themselves, we need to be more open to hearing about challenges. We need to stop the toxic mindset that equates accomplishments to success. 

We should never make assumptions about what someone has gone through. That way, we’ll be able to have real and honest conversations with everyone, no matter whether they’re good or bad. 

That being said, we shouldn’t assume other people’s challenges even if we aren’t able to have these real and honest conversations. We never know what really happened in someone’s life, so it’s best to wait until they feel comfortable opening up.