Do We Ever Truly Know How Others Feel?

Photo: Josh Hild on Pexels

For the past week, I have been carrying a heavy weight on my heart. My application for a long-term EU residence permit — the one I’d applied for two years ago, the one that would finally let me move to my dream country — had been denied. Feeling that my dreams had been squashed and my life was ruined, I did what any rational but wounded adult would do — I cried continuously while on the phone with my mum.

While an excellent listener, my mum could not just sit passively and watch her child hurt. Something had to be done.

“What can I do to help?” she asked me gently.

“Nothing, really,” I sobbed. “There’s nothing anyone can do.”

She wouldn’t have that. Less than half an hour into my weeping, I heard the sound of a keyboard typing on the other end of the line. Mum was on an online hunt for alternative solutions to my predicament.

I, however, was not in the mood for my aches to be soothed or my hope restored. Couldn’t she drop that can-do attitude for one second and appreciate how hopeless my situation was?

“Imagine being stuck in a country you can’t stand living in. Where you don’t feel like yourself and can’t express yourself fully. Imagine wanting to leave for years and not being able to,” I said mid-sob.

“I can’t imagine that,” she replied placatingly. “I love living here and I don’t want to move anywhere else. So I can’t really imagine what it feels like.”

Her words gave me no comfort at the time; they only fueled my despair further. But a day or two later, after I calmed down and the tears dried, my thoughts wandered to that conversation, and it dawned on me how profound my mother’s words were.

Do we ever truly know how others feel? Can we really understand someone else’s feelings?

It can be argued that humans are, at their base level, the same. We have the same fundamental needs, thought processes, and responses to outside triggers. But however similar any two people might be, they’re still different people. With different nervous systems and life experiences. With different sets of DNA, after all. Life passes through us differently, no matter what the patterns suggest. We feel and react differently. My sister and I were raised by the same parents in the same family setting, in nearly identical conditions, yet we’re different in so many aspects. We have some fundamental human qualities in common — kindness, empathy, ability to love — yet we express them each in our own way.

Humans are capable of understanding one another to a large extent. (Thank heaven for that, or else we couldn’t coexist.) But what we really mean by “I know how you feel” is “I can imagine how circumstances such as yours would make me feel, and so I assume you’re feeling something similar.” We react to loss with heartache. We’re elated in a new relationship and frustrated when we haven’t heard from a prospective employer three weeks after the job interview. We’re excited about a trip we’ve planned with our partner. There are patterns, yes, but each experience of life is still as unique as a fingerprint.

My mum can’t imagine how I’m feeling, stuck in a country I seem unable to either love or leave, for the simple reason that she’s not me. She’s not in my shoes and never has been. She can only assume I’m feeling frustrated and sad and angry and desperate, but she doesn’t actually know what it’s like to rehearse every single thing you’re about to say because you’ve never fully settled into the language of the country you’ve lived in for years. Or to have your life half-paused because you don’t want to acquire possessions or begin relationships that would tie you to a place you know you absolutely can’t spend the rest of your life in.

All she can do is be there for me as I cry into the phone, and look for ways to help me, or say how very sorry she is that this is happening. And sometimes that’s plenty.

Maybe we should just accept that, however well we might know someone — and they us — we will never truly feel their feelings. And they won’t ever feel ours. We’re different people. However anatomically and psychologically similar we might be, our brains are wired in ways others cannot fathom, and our hearts break and mend in ways unknown to anyone else.

All we can do, really, is be there for one another. Witness someone else’s elation, excitement, frustration, or despair.

And ask, perhaps, “What can I do to help?”

Or, if there’s nothing to be done, say, “I’m very sorry this is happening to you.”