There is a feeling that comes when you are carrying something heavy and you look around at everyone else.
It is the feeling that you are the only one.
You are on the train, or in the supermarket queue, or at the school gate, and the people around you appear, to your eyes, 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, with the prayer you cannot say, with the diagnosis or the grief or the marriage that is failing — you feel acutely separate. You are the broken one in a room full of intact people.
This is one of the deepest lies of suffering. It is also one of the most common.
The lie tells you that your collapse is unique. That if these other people could see inside you, they would recoil. That your unmanageable interior makes you, somehow, a different species from the calm-looking strangers on the morning bus.
But you are looking at their outsides. They are looking at your outside. None of you is seeing what is actually happening.
The reality of a high-pressure age is that 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 trying to find the one that works. The teenager scrolling silently across from you on the underground is, perhaps, in a depression that nobody at home has noticed yet.
You cannot see any of this from where you are sitting. 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 that layer, most of the carriage is carrying something.
This is not a cynical observation. It is a Christian one.
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. The line is sometimes attributed to Philo of Alexandria, sometimes to a Scottish minister. Whoever first said it, it has held up because it is true.
The Bible knows this. Each heart knows its own bitterness, and no one else can share its joy (Proverbs 14:10). The verse is doing two things at once. It is saying that there is, in each person, an interior nobody else can fully reach. It is also saying that this is the normal condition of being a human. The bitterness in your heart is not a sign of your defectiveness. It is a sign of your humanness. Every heart has one. Most of them are kept quiet, most of the time.
When you let this knowing settle, something strange and steadying begins to happen.
The loneliness loosens. Not because you have found someone to talk to. Because you have remembered that the people around you are, mostly, not the untouched beings your lonely mind had made them into. They are, mostly, fellow carriers. The strangers on the train are not a different species. They are your kin. They are walking, like you, with hidden loads. They are, like you, 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 not lighter because the woman next to you is also carrying one. But the suffering is now, in some small way, belonging suffering. 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, in their own particular ways, also being held together by something larger than themselves.
This is one of the quietest gifts of being part of the body of Christ. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it (1 Corinthians 12:26). Paul did not mean this metaphorically. He meant that the church is a body in which, when any of us suffers, the suffering is genuinely shared — even when nobody knows about it, even when we are not speaking, even when the sharing is happening at a depth none of us can yet see. The communion of saints is real. The fellow-carrying is real. The fact that you cannot see it does not mean it is not happening.
The next time you are on a train, or in a queue, or in a waiting room, look around with this knowing.
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 of boats, all of which are taking on water in some way, all of which are being held up by a sea that has not, despite the storm, swallowed any of you.
The road is long.
You are not walking it alone.
