The realization that each random passerby is the main character of their own story, living a life just as vivid and complex as your own, while you are just an extra in the background. John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

When I was a little girl, I loved riding in the backseat of my father’s boat-like brown Oldsmobile late at night. As my parents rehashed the family gathering we’d just left, I peered into the lighted windows of the homes we passed and wondered about the people who lived inside. What the adults did for a living, how many children they had, whether they fought, what they did for fun. I liked thinking about how big the world was and how many people inhabited it that I didn’t even know.

It didn’t occur to my younger self to dwell on how different my life might be from theirs. Being an only child was much less common when I was growing up. Having a mother who was almost 40 when I was born was also unusual but having a father in his sixties was unheard of. Instead, I focused on similarities – the same size house, a mother who stayed home, a classmate who also loved climbing trees and turning cartwheels on the lawn.

My elementary and secondary school friends grew up in nuclear families for the most part. We walked to school by ourselves and spent our afternoons cruising around on our bikes, drinking chocolate milkshakes at Carl’s Junior, returning home just in time for dinner. Every now and then, I’d catch a glimpse of what went on inside my friends’ houses that diverged markedly from my own – an older sister shooting heroin in the bathroom, a mother chasing a friend’s older brother through the house and threatening to smack him with a broom. But mostly, I lacked both the exposure and imagination to grasp the challenges and complexities of other people’s lives.

It was a time when we were taught not to talk about what went on inside the four walls of our own house. Miscarriages weren’t discussed nor was mental illness or addiction. When those things happened in my family, I thought they were unique to us.

The first day I volunteered at Jimmy’s preschool, just days after my own miscarriage, I was dumbfounded by the number of mothers who pulled me aside and quietly shared their own stories of infant loss. One mom told me that she lost seven babies and was about to give up on having a second child when she became pregnant with the daughter who raced by us on a primary-colored tricycle as we talked.

That conversation was the first time I can remember being struck by how much people quietly carry. The mother’s eagerness to talk about the pain of living a pregnancy-loss-wait three months cycle over and over and over again stayed with me, as did the way her words poured out as if it was a story she normally couldn’t share. It was also my first experience understanding the comfort that comes from knowing others have had something terrible happen to them, too. The way the words “me, too” have the power to make you feel less alone and less at fault.

At the time, I lacked the language to capture or process what I was learning. That came later with my son  Jimmy’s cancer diagnosis, recurrence and death as I discovered over and over just how unaware I’d been. Of how unfair life is, how arbitrary, how random. I didn’t stumble over the word sonder until years later, but it beautifully describes what I had come to comprehend .. that everyone has a story, one that not just passersby, but family and close friends may never fully fathom.

I have spent so much of my life focused on my role as the main character. The only one whose experiences and insights, knowledge and wisdom mattered. Dismissing the views and advice of what author John Koenig calls my supporting cast when they didn’t line up with my own. It never occurred to me that those who Koenig refers to as the extras – random passersby – were living lives just as rich and complicated and brutal and beautiful as my own.

I still peer into lighted windows when I’m driving home late at night but my questions are different now. I wonder what the inhabitants struggle with, what keeps them up late at night. I ponder who they have loved and lost and whether they, too, have ever found themselves unable to get out of bed or unwilling to leave the house. Like my younger self, I imagine the ways our lives might be similar. Not in demographics or external trappings, but in the experiences and emotions we might share. The ways life has been unjust or hard. The way some people have let us down and others have stepped up to catch us when we fell.

I no longer need to know the circumstances of someone’s life to know that they, too, have hurt and struggled. The details matter less than the fact that they have survived their own hard things and found a way to get back up and go on. That whether we know everyone else’s stories or not, we are never fully alone in our own.