Empathy For Others Heading Towards Collapse
As I reflect back on the years of my life before everything collapsed in 2019, I don’t really recall having conversations with people in my life about their internal worries or fears of their life collapsing. I don’t remember people speaking about what it might look like if they stopped spinning so many plates at once. As I look back on the business world I was in at that time, as an agency owner with a growing team, clients of various sizes, industry connections, and peers I would engage with and speak alongside at conferences, those kinds of conversations simply weren’t happening.
I didn’t have conversations like the ones I have had since my life collapsed in 2019. Since what I experienced - marital collapse, business collapse, professional life collapse, public collapse - my conversations with people have been very different. I have had many conversations with both men and women who are themselves carrying weights and burdens from their past, often things they have never spoken to anyone about before.
On many occasions, as I have shared a little of my life before collapse, people have said to me words like, “I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but…” and then gone on to share parts of their life that are deeply relatable to things I experienced. I have also had times where people have said, “I’ve never told this to anyone else before, but…” and they have opened up to me, sometimes even though we have only just met and are having our first conversation.
This is now the depth of conversation I typically have following the collapse of my life as I knew it, and through the rebuilding of my life. The depth of conversation is so different to before I experienced collapse. It makes me reflect on what has changed since 2019. Before the collapse, there were very few, if any, deep conversations about what people were carrying internally. Now, those conversations are happening.
Because of this, I can only imagine how many people today are carrying hidden burdens, carrying weight that they may have held since a young age, with no one they have felt able to open up to or share with. Perhaps they have never felt safe. Perhaps they have never known someone they could trust, who would simply listen without judgment or commentary. My heart is to be someone who men and women, one to one, in private, feel comfortable with, feel at peace with, and feel safe enough to open up and speak about life experiences they have never felt able or safe to share before.
