Everyone Is Carrying a Story You Cannot See

I was standing in a crowd recently at Calvin Harris in Hampden and had one of those moments where I stopped looking at the crowd as a crowd and started seeing people. Thousands of them, dancing, singing, laughing, taking photos, holding drinks, throwing their arms around their friends and from the outside everyone looks happy but I remember looking around and thinking...

Imagine the stories standing in this room.

Someone here might have received devastating news this week, someone might have just landed the job they have worked towards for years, someone could be going through a divorce, someone may have finally left a relationship they thought they would never have the courage to leave. someone might be grieving, someone might be pregnant and hasn't told anyone yet, someone might have just lost a pregnancy,

someone could be struggling financially while standing there wearing an outfit they bought months ago,

someone might be celebrating the fact that, for the first time in a very long time, they actually feel like themselves again and yet for those few hours, we all stood together.

We do this everywhere.

It isn't only concerts, think about a football stadium thousands of people shouting for the same team,

the person sitting beside you could be having the best year of their life, the person two rows in front might be struggling to get through the day and you would never know.

Think about the school gate, parents arriving with packed lunches remembered, uniforms washed, hair brushed and children delivered roughly on time but behind those cars pulling into the playground could be relationship problems, sleepless nights, financial worries, fertility struggles, difficult diagnoses, work pressure, loneliness or grief.

Think about a party, the person laughing the loudest might be having a brilliant time or they might desperately need one.

Think about work, meetings, coffee shops, airports, gyms, supermarket queues, everywhere we go people are showing us the tiny visible part of a much bigger life.

We are incredibly good at filling in the blanks.

We look at someone and make assumptions straight away:

'They've got it all together', 'they are so confident', 'they are really successful', 'they are super lucky', 'they are pretty difficult', 'they are a bit quiet', 'they are blooming rude', 'they are unmotivated', 'they are always happy'.

We know deep down what we are seeing is often one moment in a story containing thousands of others and that's one of the biggest lessons I have learned from spending more than two decades working closely with people.

What someone shows you and what someone is carrying can be two completely different things.

Sometimes the person who appears the strongest is exhausted from being the person everyone relies on.

Sometimes the successful person is questioning everything. Sometimes the confident person spent years learning how to trust themselves. The person who seems distant is simply trying to hold themselves together, sometimes “I'm fine” is genuinely fine and yet sometimes it means 'I don't know where to begin?'

Beneath every title is a human being.

CEO.

Manager.

Parent.

Teacher.

Footballer.

Business owner.

Hairdresser.

Doctor.

Coach.

Partner.

Friend.

They are all useful labels but they don't tell us very much about the person underneath them. I believe beneath the job title, relationship status, Instagram profile, salary, house, car or achievements is a human being navigating a life we may know absolutely nothing about.

A human being with fears, memories, responsibilities, regrets, hopes, losses, pressure, dreams and things they might never say out loud.

That is what Beneath the Title means to me, it is remembering to look beyond what someone does and stay curious about who they are.

Perhaps we could all use a little more of that.

More curiosity before judgement, more conversation, more checking in, more listening without immediately trying to fix, more remembering that everyone has something going on, not because we should walk around assuming everyone is struggling but because recognising someone's humanity changes the way we meet them.

The next time you are standing in a crowd at a concert, football match, school gate, party or even waiting for your coffee why not have a look around? Really look, every single person you can see has lived an entire life that you know almost nothing about, they have loved people, lost people, made mistakes, changed direction, worried about things at 3am, had moments they thought might break them, had moments they will remember forever and somehow, on that particular day your stories happened to cross paths.

I think there is something quite beautiful about that because maybe we don't need to know everyone's story,

maybe we just need to remember that there is one.

Lisa