If We Could See What People Carry

A few nights ago, my husband and I watched Shallow Hal. I had seen it before and thought he might enjoy it.

For anyone unfamiliar with the movie, Hal has been conditioned to judge women almost entirely by their physical appearance. Then something happens that causes him to see people according to their inner beauty. A woman whose heart is kind and generous appears beautiful to him, regardless of what she looks like to everyone else.

It is a funny movie, but the idea behind it stayed with me.

What if we really could see inside people?

Not just their inner beauty. Not simply whether someone has a good heart.

What if we could also see what they are carrying?

A few days after watching the movie, my husband and I had an argument about an ice pack.

Yes. An ice pack.

It sounds ridiculous because it was ridiculous. Except, of course, it wasn’t really about the damned ice pack.

My husband and I rarely argue. We may disagree, but we are generally very good at communicating with each other. We respect each other, we like each other, and we usually give one another the benefit of the doubt. The little things he does that occasionally annoy me are exactly that—little things. I let most of them go because he is a good man, a wonderful husband, and being mildly annoyed sometimes is part of sharing your life with another human being.

But this time, his response hurt my feelings.

And I snapped.

The first two months of my retirement have not remotely resembled retirement. There was our trip to Kentucky and everything that entailed. Then my husband’s granddaughters came to visit. I am not a kid person, and our house is not set up particularly well for guests of any age, so that visit took more out of me than it might have taken out of someone else.

Then came the entire ongoing mess surrounding a former tenant and our RV—a situation that has required cleaning, research, documentation, decision-making, more cleaning, more research, and an absurd amount of continuing mental space. Now, on day fifteen, the issues are still not resolved.

Mixed in with all of that are my normal responsibilities at home: cleaning, meal planning, grocery shopping, laundry, errands, vacation preparation, unfinished projects—including several major ones that keep getting pushed aside because something else becomes more urgent—and the thousand little details that somehow need to be noticed, remembered and managed.

Some of those things are significant. Some are objectively small.

But stress is cumulative. The tenth small thing does not land on an empty surface. It lands on top of the other nine—and the three large things—and whatever else the person was already carrying before any of them happened.

So, when the ice-pack incident occurred, it did not land on an empty surface.

The next evening, when my husband came home, he seemed off. I was off too. I assumed we were both still upset about the same stupid argument, and I was too mired in my own hurt feelings to spend much energy investigating his.

That is unusual for me.

Normally, I can tell when he is stressed before he consciously recognizes it himself. I notice changes in his voice, his expression, his energy. I can often sense that something is wrong before he says a word.

But this time, I missed it.

When we finally talked, I learned how much he had been carrying too.

He was recently promoted, and although work is going well, it is stressful. He is also working toward his master’s degree. On weekends, he is trying to finish our kitchen remodel because we have numerous other projects waiting behind it. He needs to get the Jeep set up for towing before we leave on vacation in October. He knows how much time I have spent dealing with the RV situation and everything else around the house, and he feels guilty when he cannot help because he has schoolwork that must be finished.

Meanwhile, he has also been making a conscious effort to notice things that need to be done without waiting for me to point them out—because I have told him, more than once, how exhausting it is to feel like the only person responsible for noticing and managing everything.

Wow.

I had no idea he was carrying all of that.

During our conversation, my husband said it would be helpful if I had some kind of visible meter on my arm or forehead—something like a thermometer that showed my current stress and overload level. Then he could see when I was approaching capacity, even if he did not completely understand every individual thing contributing to it.

And there it was.

Shallow Hal.

Hal could look at a person and see the beauty of their heart. But maybe seeing someone’s heart does not go far enough.

Maybe we also need to see their meter.

Imagine if stress, grief, fear, pain and overwhelm were visible. Imagine if we could see the mental load another person was carrying before adding one more thing to it. Imagine if we knew that the person who appeared impatient was operating at 97 percent capacity—or that the person who seemed distracted was using nearly everything available to them merely to keep functioning.

Would we speak more gently?

Would we take fewer things personally?

Would we pause before deciding that someone was overreacting to something small?

Perhaps we would recognize that it may be small—but it did not arrive alone.

In our case, the ice pack was not evidence that our marriage was in trouble or that either of us had suddenly become a different person. We were still the same two people with the same hearts. We were simply two people whose invisible meters were both in the red.

Mine was so deep in the red that I temporarily lost the ability to see his.

That realization was humbling.

It also made me think about all the other visible things we use to evaluate people.

Physical beauty is one. Money is another.

I recently encountered a prospective tenant who seemed to believe his financial position should open a particular door for him. He could afford what was being offered, and in his mind, that appeared to settle the question of whether he should have access to it.

But the ability to pay does not tell me whether someone is a good fit.

Money does not reveal integrity. It does not establish character. It does not demonstrate respect for boundaries, consideration for others, or compatibility with the life already taking place on the other side of the door.

Money measures resources. It does not measure the person possessing them.

It may open many doors, but it does not create an entitlement to every door—and some doors are not really about price at all.

We do this in countless ways. We see beauty and assume goodness. We see wealth and assume worth. We see competence and assume unlimited capacity. We see someone continuing to function and assume that person must be fine.

We confuse what is visible with what is true.

If we could genuinely see inside one another, we would not find only hidden beauty. We would see kindness and generosity, yes—but also pain, fear, grief, entitlement, selfishness, courage, integrity, exhaustion and resilience. We would see both what people are made of and what they are carrying.

Those are not the same thing.

Seeing someone’s heart might tell us who that person fundamentally is.

Seeing the meter might tell us where that person is today.

Neither eliminates the need for discernment. Understanding that someone is stressed does not excuse cruel behavior. Recognizing another person’s pain does not obligate us to surrender our boundaries. Compassion does not require us to ignore character, and money does not require us to ignore fit.

But perhaps seeing more clearly would help us extend grace where grace is warranted—and recognize more quickly where it is not.

My husband and I did not need an assessment of each other’s hearts. We already knew who we had married.

We needed to see what the other person was carrying.

Maybe most of us do.

We cannot actually see a meter on another person’s forehead. We cannot look at someone and immediately know the weight of everything sitting beneath the surface.

But we can remember that the meter is there.

And perhaps that is the next best thing.

To my husband: I love you more ...