Communication

It is hard to understand someone else's feelings if I haven't been there myself.

I can empathize. I can sympathize. I can imagine and feel for and do all sorts of other things, but I don't really know the experience unless I have gone through it myself. Even then, I only know the way I reacted to it, the way my body and soul understood and suffered through it, which may be completely different from yours.

We are all different. We come from different places, have different sensitivities, different support systems. We may all be in this together, but we are still awfully alone and isolated.

This pebble may rock your boat when it falls into the deep water, but we aren’t Borgs. You still don’t know why and where I fell and how hard I hit the water, or how much it hurt, or where I landed -- unless I tell you.

Communication is a skill that needs to be honed and refined and like anything else, practice makes perfect.