“What? You, too? I thought it was only me!”

If this sentence sounds ‘relatable’ to you, you must have experienced some kind of relatability at some point, too. Relating to someone else allows you to see pieces of who you are reflected somewhere outside your own self, which can further strengthen the connection you feel towards them.

It’s common to think about it in terms of words you read in a book, characters you see on the screen, or even memes you come across while scrolling through your feed. That sense of familiarity when something about the outside world echoes back to a long-unspoken truth within you. And perhaps the most relatable fact about the human race is our collective, yet very private, belief that we are all different from everyone else in the world.

The degree of relatability in a certain setting is very much correlated with the extent to which we fear being judged. When we exist in a space where we feel safe sharing pieces of ourselves without spotting a look of judgment in the eyes of those around, we often walk away feeling a lot more whole; like who we are does make more sense down to the deepest parts of our souls. For it’s in realizing that we’re never the only ones going through whatever we go through, that we slowly begin to heal.