The Reality I Cannot Share

Illustration by Mist Z, Behance

When I was younger, maybe 12, I had a thought that I didn’t know how to explain to anyone.

It wasn’t dramatic, and it didn’t come from anything specific happening. It just appeared one day, and once it did, I couldn’t ignore it.

I realised that I was experiencing everything from inside my own body - and that I would never be able to step outside of it.

I could see what I see, hear what I hear, feel things the way I feel them. But that was it. That was the limit. No matter how much I tried to imagine it, I would never be able to look through someone else’s eyes or feel something exactly as they do.

And just as clearly, I understood the reverse. No one would ever be able to do that with me.

At the time, I didn’t have the language for it. I didn’t know that people had already written about perception or consciousness or the limits of experience. It just felt like a fact that I had come across too early. I remember sitting with it and trying to test it in small ways. Looking at other people and wondering what the world looked like from where they were. Not just physically, but internally - how things felt to them, how their thoughts moved, how their emotions sat inside their bodies.

There was no way to get there.

Years later, I found that this idea exists in different forms across philosophy.

Thinkers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote about how our bodies are not separate from our experience of the world - they are the condition for it. There is no neutral, objective way of seeing things that exists outside of the body. Everything is filtered through it.

There’s also the long-standing question of whether we can ever truly know what another person is experiencing. We can observe, interpret, and respond, but their actual experience remains out of reach. Thomas Nagel approached this by asking what it would be like to be a bat - pointing out that even complete knowledge doesn’t give us access to what an experience feels like from the inside.

ImageSource: https://philosophybytheway.blogspot.com/2020/01/what-is-it-like-to-be-bat.html

We move through life as if reality is shared.

We talk about “the same experience,” “the same moment,” “the same feeling.” It’s a useful way of speaking, but it hides something more complicated.

Two people can go through the same situation and come away with entirely different realities. Not just different interpretations, but different experiences at the level of perception and feeling. The same sentence can land as reassurance for one person and as criticism for another. The same silence can feel calm to someone and unbearable to someone else.

Even the simplest things aren’t guaranteed to match. We agree on what to call colours, but we don’t know if we see them the same way. We assume that when we say “pain” or “joy,” we are referring to something shared, but the actual experience behind those words never leaves the person feeling it.

So what we call a shared reality might be closer to alignment than sameness. We are not inside the same experience - we are moving alongside each other, sometimes closely, sometimes not.

Artist: Alex Alemany, b. 1943

There is a kind of distance in that which doesn’t disappear, even in close relationships.

You can care about someone deeply and still not know what their experience feels like from the inside. You can listen carefully, ask the right questions, try to understand - and still be working with something partial.

Empathy helps, but it has limits. It allows you to respond with care, to recognise patterns, to relate things back to your own experience. But it doesn’t give you access. It doesn’t let you cross into someone else’s perspective in a complete way.

That might explain why people can feel misunderstood even when they are surrounded by people who care about them. It’s not always a failure of effort. Sometimes it’s a limitation built into how we exist.

Language doesn’t resolve this either. It allows us to point towards what we experience, but not to transfer it. The person listening reconstructs meaning using their own references, their own history, their own way of processing the world.

For a long time, this felt unsettling to me. Not because it meant I was alone in a literal sense, but because it introduced a boundary that couldn’t be crossed. No matter how much connection there is, there is always a point where it stops.

But over time, I’ve started to see it differently. If it’s true that I can’t fully access another person’s experience, then understanding them is not something that happens automatically. It becomes something you have to work towards, knowing that you won’t complete it.

Listening becomes more deliberate. Assumptions become less reliable. Certainty about other people starts to feel misplaced.

There is also something that shifts in how you see others. If every person is experiencing the world in a way you can’t enter, then each person carries a version of reality that is entirely their own. Not just in a superficial sense, but in a way that is structurally inaccessible. That doesn’t make connection impossible. It just changes what it is.

I still think about that moment from when I was younger. The thought itself hasn’t changed. I am still experiencing everything from the same point of view, and I always will. What has changed is that it no longer feels like something I need to resolve. It feels more like something to remain aware of. I have my way of experiencing the world. Other people have theirs.

And whatever understanding exists between us happens somewhere in between - never complete, but not insignificant either.