Glass Houses

I’m thinking about empathy today, friends.

And about how we pretend like we know what others are living through, and how we can fix it.

Most of us don’t know how it feels to be an addict.

We don’t know what it’s like to feel un-loved.

Most of us have never been truly starving.

Or homeless.

Or utterly alone.

This makes it impossible for us to opine, with any authority, about the origins or solutions to any of the above problems. Scholarship be damned – if we haven’t felt it, we don’t know it.

I judge and hypothesize as much as, if not more than, the general population. Today, I’m remembering why that’s not okay. Every court news story, every mug shot, every obituary belongs to a person. A person with a story. The person may be someone’s son, a favorite student, the kid next door.

A person is more than the sum of their bad decisions.