Sometimes You Can’t See What Someone Is Carrying

Y’all, this one really got to me.

I actually had to get myself together before I could even write this because I found myself sitting here in tears thinking about Hayden Panettiere and how incredibly sad this entire situation is.

And the more I thought about it, the more I realized I wasn’t crying simply because a famous actress died. I was thinking about something much bigger than that.

I was thinking about how much hurt human beings can carry inside of them.

Pain from childhood. Pain from relationships. Trauma. Loss. Addiction. Depression. Regret. Things that happened 20 or 30 years ago that everyone around you assumes you should have gotten over by now.

Except sometimes you don’t.

And I think that’s something we don’t talk about enough.

You can go to therapy. You can talk to your friends. You can talk to your family. You can tell your story a hundred times. You can understand exactly where your pain came from and why you react the way you do.

And sometimes it still hurts.

Talking about something doesn’t magically erase it.

There are things in my own life that I wish I could completely let go of. Things I wish didn’t still hurt. Things I wish I could simply forget. I’ve talked about them. I’ve analyzed them. I’ve gotten older and wiser and looked at them differently.

But some things leave a mark.

And maybe that’s why this hit me so hard.

From the outside, we look at people like Hayden Panettiere and think, How could someone who seemingly has so much still be hurting so badly?

Beautiful. Talented. Successful. Famous. A career most people could only dream about.

But none of those things protect a person from what is happening inside their own mind.

And I think that’s especially difficult for people from my generation—and probably the generations before mine—to understand.

Mental health wasn’t discussed the way it is today.

Hell, half the time our parents’ solution was basically, get over it.

That was therapy. 😂

You were sad? Get over it.

You were mad? Get over it.

Something hurt your feelings? Get over it.

And God knows you weren’t sitting your parents down explaining your boundaries and discussing how their behavior affected your emotional well-being. 😂

Most of us didn’t even know what a boundary was.

If your mother cooked dinner and you didn’t like it, you had two choices: eat it or go hungry.

If you didn’t like something your parents said or did, nobody was asking how that made you feel.

You survived it, you grew up, and you moved on.

Except maybe some of us didn’t completely move on.

Maybe we just learned how to carry it.

And that’s what I keep thinking about tonight.

We still don’t know exactly what happened to Hayden. There have been reports of a possible overdose, but an official cause of death has not been determined, and I don’t think it’s fair for any of us to decide whether something was intentional when we simply don’t know.

But we do know that she had publicly talked about struggles in her life.

And now a 36-year-old woman is gone.

A daughter has lost her mother.

Parents have lost their daughter.

People who loved her have lost someone they can never get back.

And that is heartbreaking.

It also makes me wonder what we can actually do differently.

We always say, Get help.

And yes—please get help.

We say, Talk to somebody.

Absolutely talk to somebody.

We say, Go to therapy.

Please do.

But I also think we need to understand that getting help doesn’t necessarily mean every painful thing inside of someone disappears.

Sometimes healing isn’t forgetting.

Sometimes healing is learning how to live with something without allowing it to destroy you.

And sometimes people are fighting battles every single day that nobody around them knows exist.

I’ll say something else that might make some people uncomfortable, but I’m going to be truthful.

Have I ever had a fleeting thought in my life about what it would be like not to be here anymore?

Yes.

I’m human.

But it wasn’t something I wanted to do or planned to do. It was a passing thought during an incredibly difficult moment, and there’s a very big difference.

Still, having ever felt even a tiny glimpse of that darkness makes me understand that you cannot look at somebody else’s life from the outside and decide how they should feel on the inside.

You can’t say, But she’s beautiful.

You can’t say, But he’s rich.

You can’t say, But she has children.

You can’t say, But they have everything.

Because pain doesn’t check your bank account.

Depression doesn’t care how beautiful your house is.

Trauma doesn’t care how successful your career became.

And addiction doesn’t care how many people love you.

Human beings are complicated.

We carry things.

And sometimes the person laughing the loudest, accomplishing the most, looking the prettiest or seemingly living the most incredible life is carrying something you know absolutely nothing about.

I don’t know what the answer is.

I wish I did.

I wish there were some perfect combination of therapy, medicine, love, family and support that could guarantee nobody would ever reach a place where they felt like they couldn’t keep going.

There isn’t.

But maybe we can pay a little more attention.

Maybe we can listen a little longer.

Maybe we can judge a little less.

Maybe instead of looking at someone and thinking, What in the world do you have to be unhappy about? we remember that we have absolutely no idea what it feels like to live inside another person’s mind.

Whatever the final circumstances surrounding Hayden’s death turn out to be, tonight I just find the entire thing incredibly sad.

Thirty-six years old.

That’s just too damn young.

And somewhere tonight there is a little girl who no longer has her mother.

That’s the part that breaks my heart the most.

So maybe tonight we give people a little more grace.

And maybe we remember that having a beautiful life on the outside doesn’t always mean someone feels beautiful on the inside.

You just never know what somebody is carrying. 💔