I spend my professional life trying to understand people. It is literally what I do. Someone sits across from me and I am working to see the world through their eyes, to trace the thread from where they are back to where it started. I am good at it, and I genuinely love it.
But that gift has a shadow side.
In my personal life, I carry that same compulsion into spaces where it doesn't belong. I find myself analyzing a stranger's behavior, trying to decode why someone I barely know acted a certain way, turning over the words of a casual acquaintance like there's some deeper meaning I'm missing. And most of the time, there isn't. Or if there is, it's none of my business.
The Itch You Don't Need to Scratch
There's a certain kind of person, and I am that person, who experiences other people's behavior as an unresolved question. We want to know why. We want the explanation. We want it to make sense. And when it doesn't, when someone acts oddly or coldly or in a way that doesn't add up, we spin.
What I've been sitting with lately is a simple and almost startlingly freeing idea: I just don't need to know.
That person who seemed irritated with me for no reason? I don't need to know why. The stranger who made a strange comment? Don't need to know. The connection that went sideways and I can't figure out what happened? Maybe I just don't get to know, and that's fine. That is more than fine. That might be exactly right.
Not Everything Is a Puzzle You Were Meant to Solve
People are complicated. Their behavior is shaped by things you will never have access to: their history, their mood that day, their fears, their wounds, the fight they had before they walked out the door that morning. You are one small variable in a massive equation you can't see.
When you release the need to understand everyone, you stop making their story about you. You stop borrowing weight that isn't yours to carry. You move through the world with more ease.
Discernment matters. Knowing when to dig deeper versus when to let something pass is a skill worth developing. But the default doesn't have to be analysis. Sometimes the most honest and healthy thing you can do is acknowledge that you don't have the full picture and decide that's okay.
I offer this one for myself as much as anyone. I'm working on it. And man, it is liberating to try.