"The truth is that we all have more pain than the world typically knows."

This excerpt is from an essay by Frank Bruni that appears in his book The Beauty Of Dusk: 

After I woke up one morning several years ago with freakishly blurred vision, doctors figured out quickly what was wrong: I’d had a rare stroke of sorts. Overnight, it had ravaged the optic nerve behind my right eye.

Worst-case scenario? The left eye would follow suit, leaving me blind. Best? Some improvement. Much adjustment. But I’d never see as clearly as before.

And, indeed, I didn’t. A thin but permanent fog hangs over the right edge of my field of vision, awaiting a sun that never comes. I sometimes confuse objects’ exact positioning in relation to one another, so I often “love” when I should “live” and “live” when I should “love,” the “i” and “o” being next-door neighbors on keypads. And my depth perception can be out of whack, as people who had me serve wine to them in the months after my stroke can attest. I’d overshoot their glasses and splash nebbiolo on their laps.

I stopped pouring. I stewed in frustration. I lived in suspense, willing my left eye to hang in there. And as it did, there was a blessed development that the doctors didn’t augur: Bit by bit, the people around me came into sharper focus, by which I mean that their fears, struggles and triumphs did.

The paradox of my own situation — I was outwardly unchanged but roiling inside — made me newly alert to a fundamental truth: There’s almost always a discrepancy between how people appear to us and what they’re actually experiencing; between their public gloss and private mess; between their tally of accomplishments — measured in money, rankings, ratings and awards — and a hidden, more consequential accounting. I’d long known that. We all do. But I’m not sure how keenly we register it, how steadily we remember it.

And that truth helped me reframe the silly question “Why me?” into the smarter “Why not me?” It was a guard against anger, an antidote to self-pity, so much of which hinges on the conviction, usually a delusion, that you’re grinding out your days while the people around you glide through theirs, that you’ve landed in the bramble to their clover. To feel sorry for yourself is to ignore that everyone is vulnerable to intense pain and that almost everyone has worked or is working through some version of it.

Imagine that our hardships, our hurdles, our demons were spelled out for everyone around us to see. Imagine that each of us donned a sandwich board that itemized them.

Read more: NYT Link