You Know My Name, But Not My Story

There are many who say they know us. However, there are those who speak to us without listening to us, those who see us without looking at us, those who do not waste time putting a label on us. In this world of easy judgments there are not many patient minds, those able to understand that behind a face there is a battle, that behind a name there is a great story.

Daniel Goleman, in his book Social Intelligence , explains a detail that is often overlooked. As psychologists and anthropologists tell us, the human brain is a social organ. Relationships with our fellow men are essential to survive. However, Goleman points out a further aspect: we are often “painfully social”.

These interactions don’t always come with a benefit, a positive reinforcement to learn from and assimilate. Nowadays, it may sound strange, the biggest threat to us is our own species. A threat that we can compare to a fuel that burns everything, especially in an emotional world, a place that is often vulnerable, criticized or judged through a label that commodifies us.

Each of us is like the commander of a ship trying to make its way through more or less calm or agitated oceans. Inside us, aboard a beautiful boat, we fight our personal battles. Those with which to advance despite everything, those that sometimes block us without others realizing what is happening to us, those that stop us or hurt us.

We invite you to reflect on the subject.

The story that no one sees, the book that is within us

Embracing a label means first of all giving up our capacity of perception or the opportunity to discover what lies behind the appearance, behind a face, behind a name. To get to this delicate point of human interaction, three things are needed: sincere interest, emotional openness, and quality time. Dimensions that today seem to have abandoned many souls.

We are aware of the fact that many therapeutic approaches place importance on present opportunities, on the “here and now” where it is not the past that influences us. People, however, are made up of stories, experiences, chapters that shape a past plot of which they are the result.

A past does not determine a destiny, we know, but it forges the hero or heroine that we are now. This process, this personal story that we have survived with great pride, is something that not everyone knows and that we choose to share with a few people. The only thing we ask in our daily life, therefore, is mutual respect and the abandonment of labels that want to normalize the wonderful particularities of human beings.

Let’s shift the focus of our attention

Let’s imagine for a moment a fictional person. Her name is Maria, she is 57 years old and a few months ago she started working in a shop. Colleagues consider her “old”, reserved, boring, a person who looks away when you talk to her. Few people know her story: Maria has been abused for more than 20 years. Now, after separating from her husband, she has returned to work after a long time.

It is easy to judge and label. Maria is aware of how others see her, but she knows that she needs time and if there is one thing she does not want it is for others to pity her. She doesn’t have to tell her story, she doesn’t have to do it if she doesn’t want to, she just needs those around her to shift the focus of her attention.

Instead of focusing our interest on the shortcomings of others, of making an analysis that leads to the classic stereotype that distinguishes who we are in front of ourselves, we must learn to turn off the switch of judgment and activate that of empathy. This dimension makes us “people” and not just individuals who live together in the same scenario.

We cannot forget that empathy has a concrete purpose in our emotional brain: to understand the reality of those in front of us to ensure their survival. We must learn to facilitate emotions instead of being energy predators, soul eaters or self-esteem destroyers.

We all hide very intimate, sometimes bloody battles. We are much more than what is written on our identity card, on our resume. We are stardust, as Carl Sagan once said, and we are bound to glow even if we sometimes choose to turn off each other’s lights. Let’s avoid all this and invest in respect, sensitivity and altruism.