Have you ever sat with yourself? I mean really sat with yourself and asked, “What is the most honest way to encounter another human being?”
I hadn’t either. Not really, until recently. I had spent years asking different questions, wondering how to understand people, how to recognize character, how to know when something felt true or when something felt off. It never occurred to me that perhaps I had been standing at the wrong end of the conversation all along.
Looking back, I think that realization explains something I never understood about myself. People have told me for years that I notice patterns, sometimes in ways others find annoying, that given enough time I seem to recognize the person quietly emerging beneath the story they tell about themselves. I never paid much attention to it. It wasn’t something I ever stopped long enough to sit with or pay close attention to until the first part of this year. Something deep within me tightens, sharpens, tunes in a little more, and makes me pay closer attention, the same way I notice something quietly rising to the surface long before anyone else realizes it’s there. Nobody else in the room, often not even the person across from me, seems to notice that anything has shifted. When you’re the only one who feels it, it becomes remarkably easy to convince yourself you imagined it. I spent most of my life distrusting my own observations, talking myself out of this knowing, believing dishonest people and the lies I even told myself about them, and living in a hope that tried to convince me I wasn’t right. Now it’s something I trust more than any words that come out of anyone’s mouth.
Still, noticing something in a single moment has never made me believe I know the whole of another person. I have always lived moment to moment, believing a moment deserves to be experienced before it deserves to be interpreted. I don’t enter conversations trying to decide who someone is. I enter them trying to discover who they might reveal themselves to be. I’m not a detective collecting evidence to build a case. I have sat across from people I loved, and strangers who started talking to me in airports for no reason at all, as though something in them sensed something in me that already understood. I have tried to meet them as they were that day, letting bad days remain bad days, silence be exhaustion instead of evidence, anger simply be anger, grief be held, and a missed call remain just that rather than the opening line of a story I was quietly writing against them. Underneath all of it, this has always felt like the most honest way to encounter another human being. It has taught me that silence has never needed to feel heavy to be real. There was a time I would have filled it, needing it to mean something, but now it can feel just as easy and comfortable as dancing alone in the sunlight.
Perhaps that is what allowing really is. Simply refusing to demand that another human being become different before I am willing to see them clearly. It feels like the difference between clenching a hand shut around something and simply leaving it open. Patterns have found me anyway, arriving the way weather does, uninvited, impossible to argue with once it has already moved into the room. I have tried to close the windows on it more than once, telling myself I was imagining the drop in pressure, that it would pass if I simply waited long enough. It never has. Weather doesn’t ask for permission before it arrives. Neither does truth.
Almost no single moment has ever been enough, on its own, to give me my understanding of another human being. I say almost because I have learned there are exceptions, the rare moment that lands so cleanly it tells you everything before any pattern has the chance to form. Those moments carry a different kind of certainty, one I have learned not to argue with. Given enough time, most moments are not like that. A moment can be influenced by grief, exhaustion, excitement, attraction, fear, uncertainty, hope. I have had days that were not representative of who I am, so more often than not, one moment tells me very little on its own. Left alone, moments have a remarkable way of introducing themselves to one another. They begin forming conversations of their own. Over time they stop feeling isolated and begin forming a pattern, and somewhere within that pattern another person’s character quietly starts introducing itself.
It is almost never dramatic. Character rarely arrives with an announcement. More often it appears in the smallest places, in a look that lingers a little too long, in the subtle shift of someone’s tone once they no longer need something from you, in whether they reach for you without thinking or don’t reach for you at all, in who initiates and who never does, in how carefully or how carelessly someone speaks to you, in whether their kindness survives inconvenience. Yet a look and a tone are only the surface of it. Underneath it all, character is made of action, the actual thing someone chooses once a moment asks something of them. Those actions gradually become a rhythm of their own, made of small choices and large ones, the same choice repeated until it stops looking like a decision and starts looking like a person. None of these moments are particularly remarkable on their own, yet together they begin telling a story no single moment ever could. What accumulates is not an impression. It is the quiet history of every choice someone has made when no one was asking them to make one at all.
I have written before about expectations, because they have fascinated me for years. I used to walk into moments already carrying them, often without ever realizing I was carrying anything at all. I have become convinced that expectations quietly interfere with our ability to meet another human being honestly. The trouble with expectations is that they are often decided before the moment they belong to has even arrived. We decide who someone is going to be, how they should respond, what they should say, how they should love, even how they should understand us. By the time the moment finally arrives, we’ve already handed reality a script it never agreed to perform. The moment we do that, we stop meeting them and begin meeting the story we have written about them instead, and when life inevitably forgets its lines, it ends up in disappointment and heartache. To me, that is one of the quietest tragedies in human connection. We believe we have known another person when all we ever really encountered was the story we wrote about them.
Of course, the stories we write about other people are not the only stories shaping our relationships. We find ourselves living inside stories that others have written about us as well. What I have noticed is not simply how we receive one another in a moment, but how quickly we decide who another person is, sometimes even before we stand in front of them. It happens quietly. Presence becomes availability, patience becomes permission, kindness becomes weakness, curiosity becomes interest, attention becomes pursuit, discernment becomes coldness, love becomes neediness, stillness becomes indifference, silence becomes agreement, compassion becomes obligation, grace becomes tolerance, clarity becomes cruelty. Perhaps one of the quietest truths about human connection is that our greatest qualities are often interpreted through another person’s unresolved story. None of those things have changed. Only the lens through which they are being received. There comes a time when we stop living inside another person’s version of us. We trust what we know to be true for ourselves, and we answer to no one else’s script but our own.
That is why I have always tried to enter moments differently. My intention is mine to carry. It asks nothing of another human being except that I remain honest and arrive with kindness, respect, curiosity, presence, compassion, patience, and truth, without deciding who another person is before they have had the chance to reveal themselves. Those are decisions I can make before every conversation because they belong entirely to me. Expectation asks something of another person. Intention asks something of me.
Perhaps that is also why labels have always felt so foreign to me. Not because they are always inaccurate, but because they ask another person to stop unfolding. They reduce something living into something already decided. I have never wanted to understand people that way. We deserve to remain wonderfully unfinished, free to surprise one another, free to contradict a first impression, free to become someone neither of us could have predicted. To leave another human being that much room to unfold has always felt like one of the deepest forms of respect we can offer one another.
I have spent far more time than I care to admit trying to make sense of moments that never seemed to fit together. Replaying conversations. Looking for the sentence I must have missed. Wondering whether I misunderstood someone or whether they had misunderstood me. As time passes, I find myself wondering if this is where so much confusion in our relationships begins. Confusion doesn’t begin when someone lies to us. Perhaps it begins the moment we become more committed to the story we’ve written than the person standing in front of us. Not because we fail to communicate, but because we stop observing. We begin relating to assumptions instead of moments, to conclusions instead of curiosity, and to stories instead of people. That is why I have become so protective of entering each moment without expectation. We know what happens when we don’t. We begin negotiating with reality. We explain away what we have already seen. Hope quietly becomes an editor. We ask moments to become something they never were. The moment we decide who someone is before they have had the chance to reveal themselves, we have stopped meeting them altogether. We are simply asking reality to agree with a story we have already written.
When people stop asking others to perform the role they have written for them, something extraordinary begins to happen. They become free to reveal themselves instead. Sometimes it is beautiful and magical. Sometimes it is disappointing and hurtful. Most often it is simply human. What I have found, given enough moments, enough ordinary conversations, enough quiet Tuesdays or an inconvenient Thursday, is that patterns begin to emerge. None of these moments tell the whole story. Together, they almost always do.
By now, you have probably begun forming an impression of me. I hope you have. That is part of being human. I only hope that, if our paths were ever to cross again, you would leave enough room for me to become someone you hadn’t expected. After all, this is only one moment.
The next one may tell you something entirely different.