The Double Exclusion: How difficult times can quietly change our place in other people's lives

There is a particular kind of loneliness that can happen when you are going through a difficult phase in life.

The first exclusion is often obvious. 

Your circumstances themselves may already have pushed you to the edges of life. Stress, loss, uncertainty, disappointment, financial difficulties, grief, or simply a period when nothing seems to be working can change how much you participate in the world around you. 

You may withdraw. 

You may have less energy. 

You may no longer feel able to show up in the same carefree way.

Then comes a second, quieter exclusion.

People around you begin to edit what they share with you. They hesitate before telling you good news. They leave out stories about celebrations, achievements, holidays, relationships, plans, or other happy developments. They may assume that the contrast between your difficult time and their good time will be too much.

The intention is often consideration. The impact, however, can be isolation.

You are already excluded by what life is putting you through. Then you are gradually excluded from the good things happening in other people's lives.

That is the double exclusion.

When someone is struggling, people often become careful around them. They wonder whether talking about their own happiness would seem insensitive. They may feel guilty sharing something positive while the other person is dealing with something painful. So they filter themselves. They share less. They stop mentioning certain things. Sometimes they stop inviting the person altogether, assuming that participation might be uncomfortable.

This leads to something subtle. The struggling person is still present in everyone's life, but they are no longer fully included in the whole of those lives. 

They may still be asked how they are coping. People may know their problems and try to support them. Yet the celebrations happen somewhere else. The happy news is shared with others first. The plans are discussed in circles they are no longer part of.

No one necessarily intended to push them away. Yet they are still standing outside something.

One of the assumptions behind this kind of exclusion is that someone going through a bad time cannot fully participate in someone else's happiness. But it is important to remember that people are capable of holding more than one emotion at once.

One can be worried about their future but genuinely celebrate a friend's success. 

One can be lonely and happy that someone they love has found companionship. 

One can be grieving and still laugh. 

One can wish their life were different and still want good things for others.

Someone's happiness may occasionally touch a sore point. That is part of being human. But that is often more about the reality of their own circumstances than a reaction to your happiness.

Sometimes being included in another person's joy is exactly what makes them feel connected. It reminds them that you are still part of their life. That their difficult chapter has not turned them into a person who must only be approached through sadness, caution, or concern.

Going through a bad time is something happening in their life. It is not the entirety of who they are.

And then there is another side to this dynamic.

When people do share their difficulties with us, especially when we have been through hard times ourselves, we often feel an immediate need to say, “I understand. I went through something similar.”

Sometimes this is genuine. We are trying to build a bridge between their experience and ours. We do not want them to feel alone, so we reach into our own memories and look for something that resembles what they are going through.

But occasionally, we stretch that resemblance too far.

Deep down, we may even know that what we experienced was not really the same. The circumstances were different. The scale was different. The consequences were different. Yet we still try to make the comparison work.

“I know exactly how you feel. When this happened to me…”

And suddenly, their experience begins to disappear behind our own story.

This is not always selfishness. Often, it comes from the human need to relate through familiarity. Someone else's pain can make us uncomfortable because we cannot fully enter an experience we have never had. So we search for the closest thing we know: ourselves.

We may overstate our struggles because we desperately want to establish a point of connection.

Sometimes the most honest response could be, “What you're going through isn't the same as what I went through, and I may not fully understand it. But I'm here, and I want to understand.”

There is a difference between finding shades of ourselves in another person's experience and forcing their experience to fit our own.

Perhaps that is where these two behaviours meet.

When someone is going through a bad time, we may assume we know what hearing our good news will do to them. So we decide not to share it.

When someone tells us about a struggle, we may assume we need to understand it immediately. So we search for our own version of it and try to make the comparison fit.

In both cases, the intention is often connection.

Yet both begin with an assumption about another person's experience.

Someone can be going through a terrible chapter and still want to remain part of everyone else's story. And when someone else's pain does not resemble our own, we do not have to force a resemblance in order to care.

Perhaps, in trying so hard to connect, we sometimes leave too little room for the other person's experience to remain their own.

Their own pain.

Their own happiness.

Their own version of what they are going through.

And perhaps a deeper understanding and a stronger connection sometimes begin with allowing that.

8/8: A Powerful Portal or a Powerful Belief?

8.8. The Lion’s Gate Portal

Today, social media is full of talk about manifestation, abundance, new beginnings, setting intentions, visualising what you want, and stepping into a new reality.

A friend of mine asked me whether there is any merit to this idea and what I think about manifestation in general.

I do think there can be something meaningful about choosing a day like today to pause and set an intention. There is something to be said for collective intention and the positive energy that can emerge when many people turn their attention towards possibility. 

So, 8.8 can be as good a day as any to pause and explore what manifestation means to you.

But before you begin, let me share what I believe manifestation really means.

As someone who has been writing and researching on this subject, I have become increasingly frustrated with how casually we use the word today. 

I manifested a car. 

I manifested my dream job. 

I manifested learning German. 

It has become a catch-all phrase for almost anything we wished for and eventually received, as though the wish itself made it happen.

Manifestation is far more than thinking about something, wanting it badly, or holding a beautiful idea in your mind. 

It is not simply an affirmation or a wish sent into the universe.

Manifestation is about the inner work beneath the wish. 

The beliefs you hold. 

The identity you carry. 

The patterns you repeat. And the way your inner world begins to align with the reality you want to create.

Manifestation is not a wish you make today and forget tomorrow.

It asks something deeper.

What do you believe?
Who do you believe yourself to be?
And is the person you are today aligned with the reality you say you desire?

That kind of transformation takes time.

I know you may be curious about how to make this more structured and, more importantly, how to move from a moment of intention to lasting, transformative growth. I’ll share my framework for that when the time is right. 

For me, manifestation becomes meaningful when it becomes a way of living rather than something we do on a particular day.

So take today as simply a reminder to envision an internal transformation:

Set the intention. Know the destination. Then prepare for the journey of becoming the person who can live it.

It takes only a moment to wish for a dream job or a new car.

Turning that wish into an intention you are willing to live by, and becoming the person capable of living that intention, is the longer journey.

May your wishes become intentions, your intentions become action, and your actions become your reality.

The Psychology of the Invisible Audience

Lately, I've been wondering how much of our lives are shaped by invisible audiences.

Sometimes it is the people around us who watch us.

Most of the time, it is the people we imagine are watching us.

Or the version of ourselves we hope to become.

Or the conscience we answer to.

I think that is why we often behave a certain way even when no one else is around.

We choose our words carefully even while talking to ourselves. We mentally justify our decisions and actions. We replay arguments until we end up being unequivocally right. We celebrate imaginary victories and defend ourselves against criticisms that have never been spoken. Not to mention the imagined future conversations where we finally close all the open loops.

From the outside, it may look like authenticity.

But authenticity is more complicated than simply appearing right in the eyes of other people or even ourselves.

After all, if we are still performing, who are we really being authentic for?

Psychology has long suggested that human beings do not perform only for other people. We also perform for our future selves, for our ideals, and for the identities we are trying to grow into. We compare who we are with who we believe we should be. We seek consistency between our actions and the stories we tell ourselves.

In a curious way, the self becomes both the actor and the audience.

This quiet performance is not necessarily unhealthy.

A student studying late into the night may be answering to the person they hope to become years from now. An athlete training before sunrise is often motivated by an identity rather than immediate applause. Even our private acts of discipline, kindness, or restraint may be guided by an internal observer whose approval matters more than anyone else's.

The problem begins when we ruminate over every interaction and feel the need to be accepted and right all the time.

We absorb the expectations of parents, teachers, culture, workplaces, religion, social media, and countless everyday interactions, allowing these voices to become part of our inner dialogue. We keep following their standards until they quietly become our own.

The longer we carry these voices, the harder it becomes to tell where they end and we begin.

Philosophy asks, What does it mean to live authentically?

Psychology asks, Why is authenticity so difficult?

Different questions.

The same mountain.

The philosopher encourages us to examine the life we are living. The psychologist helps us understand why examining it can feel so uncomfortable. One searches for truth. The other explains the forces that make truth difficult to see.

The more I read, the less I believe wisdom comes from accumulating new ideas.

It comes from recognising the invisible scripts we have mistaken for ourselves.

Some of those scripts deserve to stay. They remind us to be compassionate, disciplined, and responsible. Others quietly keep us trapped in borrowed expectations and outdated fears.

Growth is not simply adding another layer to who we are.

Sometimes it is having the courage to ask, Whose voice is this?

And if the answer is not our own, deciding whether it still deserves a place in the story we call ourselves.

Perhaps that is what self-awareness really is.

Not becoming someone new.

But slowly separating our own voice from the invisible audience that has been applauding us at times and judging us at others from the very beginning.

So much to learn.

So much more to unlearn.