A particular feeling arrives when you are carrying something heavy and you look around at everyone else.
You are on the train, or in the supermarket queue, or at the school gate, and the people around you appear untouched. The woman scrolling her phone is calm. The man in the suit is reading the paper. The mother chatting to her friend is laughing. They all look, from where you are standing, like people whose lives are working. And you, with the weight in your chest and the prayer you cannot say and the diagnosis or the grief or the marriage that is failing, feel acutely separate. You are the broken one in a room full of intact people.
That is one of the deepest lies suffering tells, and one of the most common. It says your collapse is unique. That if these people could see inside you, they would recoil. That your unmanageable interior makes you a different species from the calm-looking strangers on the morning bus.
You are looking at their outsides. They are looking at your outside.
Most of the people around you, on most days, are carrying more than they show.
The calm man on the train is perhaps two weeks past a bereavement. The chatty mother at the school gate is perhaps lying awake at 3 a.m. with an anxiety she has not told her husband about. The polished colleague who runs the meeting smoothly is perhaps going home to a marriage that is quietly disintegrating. The neighbour who waves cheerfully across the driveway is perhaps on her third antidepressant, still looking for the one that works. The teenager scrolling silently across from you on the underground is perhaps in a depression nobody at home has noticed.
You cannot see any of it from where you are sitting, and none of them can see yours. The visible layer of any commuting carriage, any office, any school gate, any sanctuary, is the most carefully maintained layer of every person in it. Underneath, most of the carriage is carrying something.
This is a Christian observation rather than a cynical one. "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle" is usually traced to John Watson, a Scottish minister writing at the end of the nineteenth century, though even that is uncertain. Whoever said it first, it has lasted because it is true.
Scripture knows it too. "Each heart knows its own bitterness, and no one else can share its joy" (Proverbs 14:10). The verse is saying that every person has an interior nobody else can fully reach, and that this is the ordinary condition of being human. The bitterness in your heart is a sign of your humanness rather than your defectiveness. Every heart has one, and most are kept quiet most of the time.
Something steadying happens when that knowing settles.
The loneliness loosens, not because you have found someone to talk to, but because you have remembered that the people around you are not the untouched beings your lonely mind made them into. They are fellow carriers. The strangers on the train are your kin, walking with hidden loads, getting through Tuesday on a combination of grit and grace and small mercies.
This does not solve your suffering. The weight in your chest is no lighter because the woman next to you is also carrying one. But the suffering now belongs somewhere. You are not the broken one in a room of intact people. You are a person in a room of people, all of whom are being held together by something larger than themselves.
That is one of the quietest gifts of belonging to the body of Christ. "If one part suffers, every part suffers with it" (1 Corinthians 12:26). Paul is using a metaphor, and the sharing he describes is not metaphorical. When any of us suffers, the suffering is genuinely carried by the whole, even when nobody knows about it, even when we are not speaking, even when the carrying happens at a depth none of us can see. Not seeing it does not mean it is not happening.
The person next to you is, more likely than not, also carrying something.
You are not alone in your boat. You are in a flotilla, every vessel taking on water in some way, every one of them still afloat, none of them by their own doing.
