The People Who Don't Get It

On compassion

If we’re to make it through, we must remain open to others’ perspectives. We have to truly share in their experiences.

Life-Changing Foods p. 304

One of the hardest parts about this is that nobody gets it.

I try not to talk about it anymore. With one friend, I could feel his attention drifting as I responded to his question about how things were going with my health, an impatience and resistance closing him off to what I was saying despite his efforts to suppress them. I resented it at first but I realized I can’t blame him; I wouldn’t get it either.

He really does try. Later on in that conversation he softened as I talked about the difficulties I’d had with a mutual friend, the way I didn’t feel like myself almost all the time and screwed up every social interaction I had, but he kept pressuring me to come to his events. Yeah - he just thinks you need to get out more and you’ll be fine. He doesn’t get it at all.

Another of my closest friends had always been skeptical. He wouldn’t voice it often, but back when I was in my Lyme years, he’d sent me an article about how Lyme patients come to identify with their illness and it can stop them from getting better. Later on, he came over to my place one evening and got visibly angry when he saw the latest Medical Medium book on my coffee table. He’d crossed a line, and he knew it - he collected himself almost immediately. But he was frustrated to see me continue to struggle, and didn’t want me wasting so much effort on something that in his mind clearly wasn’t going to work.

One night we went out to dinner after a month or two of not talking as much. It’s been a recurring tension in our relationship, finding ways to continue to relate despite our almost completely diverging worldviews. We’ll have points of friction but each time in the aftermath as I try to think through how I can be kinder and more respectful despite our differences, I find him doing the same thing.

It was clear to me that he was really making an effort that night. It’d been a frustration of mine that our relationship felt one-way, like I was always stepping into his world but he was never stepping into mine. But that night he was asking me questions about things he would ordinarily resist. And he was genuinely listening - really trying to let his own ideas go, softening, so that he could see things as I did and connect with me.

We starting talking about future plans. I brought up my health and the ways I was still struggling. I felt a flash of his discomfort - I know his perspective, the way our culture has conditioned both of us, and I know the way my entire understanding of the world grates against it. It’s psychological, or a lack of exercise, or his diet that’s making him tired; he’s wasting his time with this other stuff.

But he overrode it. I’ll always remember the moment - the care and willful softening in his expression as I tried to talk about it. He was really doing everything he could in that moment, surrendering everything, to try to be a good friend to me.

I wonder now if I was asking too much of him.

How couldn’t he find all of this crazy? How could a person entertain ideas like this, that go so deeply against everything they believe when they have no personal experience to support them?

I think it’s something to aspire to in relationships, being able to set aside your own perspective in order to really take in and understand someone else’s; to really see the other person on their own terms and to see the world as they do. But the more divergence in experience and worldview there is, the harder it gets. I don’t want to expect things from my friends that they can’t give - that I’m not sure I’d be able to give in their position - and I love them for trying at all.

It’s not easy to be so at odds with the rest of society. Not everyone is as kind about it. I remember in college, the knowing glances a few of my teammates would give each other when I talked about my Lyme diagnosis. And I remember years later on a ski trip with a friend, how belligerent one of his friends was once he realized I had a different perspective than he did. He was never direct, but constantly pushing the issue and probing to get a rise out of me - don’t those anti-GMO idiots realize how many lives golden rice has saved?

It’s taken me some time but I’ve realized I don’t have to explain anything to anyone. Share with people who respect you and have genuine interest to understand your perspective - set and hold a boundary with everyone else.

I didn’t say anything at the time but what I wish I’d told that guy - Hey, we clearly have different perspectives on this - that’s okay. I don’t hold it against anyone who disagrees with me. I try to keep sense of fallibility - I’ve been wrong before and will be again. But I don’t want to discuss it further. And if he continued after that - leave.

The resistance and judgment we face is because we’re so early to this - the canaries in the coal mine.

But as the Unforgiving Four continue to rise on this planet, more and more are falling ill. I’m seeing signs of it everywhere: people who were once healthy and vibrant coming down with mysterious symptoms like crushing fatigue and brain fog; going down all the same treatment paths I pursued years ago, making all the same missteps I did as they progress down the chronic illness rabbit hole.

But real progress is happening. People are much more aware now than they were even ten years ago of the challenges we’re up against - of the limitations and failings of conventional medicine and the allopathic model, of the importance of food and its impact on health, of the saturation of our environment with toxins.

It’s hard to watch people go through it when I feel like I’ve already been there and can help them avoid everything I’ve been through. But it’s the same thing as with the guy on the skiing trip - I don’t want to push my beliefs on people and presume to have the answers. Despite all of the reasons I have to be confident in this information, maybe I’m wrong. We’re all just making our best guesses.

It’s not always possible, but I think the world heals when people show each other this kind of respect - listening without an agenda, really trying to understand how things seem from their point of view, and not offering anything when they aren’t open to receiving.

And it’s not the reason to do it - I don’t think you can genuinely respect someone in this way if it’s strategic - but once people feel this coming from you, often it helps them to do the same.

Energy is heightened in the world right now and has been for some time. It feels like we’re being manipulated into conflict: diverging worldviews, inflamed egos, everyone unable to really reach or listen to one another, and a lot is at stake. It seems like it is headed towards something, that we’re being pushed towards a culmination.

But I think we have a choice, a chance to transcend and move into something greater:

I think AW means it literally when he says being open to others’ perspectives is the way to make it through. We’re being pushed to learn and grow into this ability more deeply - to really transcend ourselves and show love to those around us.

Compassion is the key.