I think I first saw you when I was 3-4 years old. I remember being so scared because I was sick and going to throw up, and my Dad was yelling at me for being a baby.
I can still remember what it felt to be there, feeling alone even though there was someone else in the room. So when you told me about how you were treated as a child and how that hurt you, I knew exactly how you felt that day.
Because I could see me in your experience, and I understood your pain.
Probably the next time I saw you I was around 7-8 years old. I remember so clearly how it felt to realize I was a child in a very big world. I had just closed to the front door on my way to school, and it felt like the whole world shifted into a different view, a sharper focus. So when you told me how lost you felt as a kid, and how you didn’t know how to handle that, I felt like I had known you forever.
I sensed every word that you said, and you seemed surprised that I could understand you so well. It was honestly pretty simple – the more I tapped into how I felt, the more you resonated.
And the greater my compassion for you became.
I know I saw you at 17, when my first serious girlfriend, the first real love of my life, broke up with me. I was such a mess, I cried for days, and I realize now that I felt shame for reacting the way that I did. So when you shared with me the heartbreak you were feeling, please believe me that I could feel all the pain and loneliness that you were going through, and all I wanted to do was hold you, and make it all go away.
I think I saw you there probably more than ever before.
I’m certain I noticed you when my wife surprised me with the news that we were pregnant. Someday I’ll share with you the funny (and honestly embarrassing) story of my reaction, but I want you to know that in that moment, I felt all the fear and uncertainty of being a parent, as well as an overwhelming, almost devastating sense of responsibility.
So when you shared with me your fears and frustrations as parent, I knew we were one and the same.
And I knew you on the day of that child’s birth, as the Doctors explained his heart problem, and how they had to open his chest and operate on his heart to save his life. The terror, the absolute and unthinkable fear that my child was going to die was something that I saw later on in you, as you explained to me the terrible loss and pain that you had experienced.
We were one in that moment, you and I. Different worlds, different lives, yet the same feelings, the same pain.
And when I held my wife as she cried over the passing of her wonderful father, and tried my best to helped her deal with the pain, I had no idea that I was seeing you, years later, as you explained to me the unfathomable experience of losing someone so close to you. I saw in her the same that I saw in you, and had some little concept of how to help you through your suffering.
In so many moments of my life, when I was looking at someone I cared about, it turns out I was seeing a reflection of you.
Because although we are different, we are more of the same than I think we ever understand. Although the recipe for my pain and suffering, or that of those whom I love, might have been different, the outcome of those ingredients produced the same emotions as the situations that you went through.
And if you look closely and carefully, in the pain of one person, you can see the suffering and heartache of another.
I’ve seen me in so many of you that sometimes my heart weeps for the things you have felt, are feeling, and will feel at a time in the future. If I could hold every single one of you, and try to take your pain, I would, because I know a little of how it feels to be you.
Because I have seen me in you, and you in me.
And so I cannot help but care for you.
Always.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings