The universal particular.
“Look for the similarities and not the differences,” was one of the first things suggested to me in early recovery. The idea being that looking for ways that my story did look like somebody else’s (even if particular points differed) would allow me to get over myself just enough to let a little bit of their experience teach me a thing or two.
I’m sure there are people out there who do this naturally but I’m not one of them. Shedding my sense of terminal uniqueness took time. (More than I’d like to admit.) I had to learn how to shift my lens to focus on commonalities. To stop looking for all the ways that my own set of circumstances made things… different for me. To let go of judgements and preconceptions and eventually never (or almost never) form them in the first place. To quit building walls. To find connection.
I’ve been sucking at it lately.
We PCS in, give or take, a month. And the closer we get to going back to the States for home leave, the more I feel like I’m leaving the only people who not only understand this life that we live but who also truly understand the particular quality of this past year. The more I’ve been feeling terminally unique or at least part of a unique few.
But I think — no, I know — that I’ve been focusing on the differences. All the ways that life overseas (and particularly life in Belgium) has been different than what my friends and family have experienced in the States.
It’s true — things here have been different. Particularly these last few weeks. We’re back to restrictive measures just as things are starting to open up back home. We still can’t have people over or gather in the park in groups larger than four. Non-essential shops are open only by appointment, restaurants are still take-away or delivery only (and have been for months), and after promising that barber shops and salons would stay open after the last shutdown… they’re closed. Again.
It’s been pretty easy lately to get jealous as my Facebook and Instagram feeds have been filling up with signs that, at least in some places, things are slowly, slowly returning to some semblance of normal. (Whether or not they’re moving too quickly is an argument for another time and place.)
But it’s also true that all of us have lived and are still living through something that has stretched every last one of us.
And if I choose to only see the ways that my own experience has been different than that of the people I love, the distance between us will just continue to grow.
I’ve come too far to let that happen.
