Sonder

“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”

—

David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King Have you ever taken a moment to ponder the fact that every person you come in contact with has their own world going on inside of them. Every person you sit next to in class, every person you walk passed on the sidewalk and every person you stand next to in the supermarket has a secret world that defines how they see the outside. This world is built on past experiences, past upbringing and current situations, among other things. People are much more complex then what they seem to be on the outside. The word I used as the title of this post is one of my favorite words in the entire world. The world "sonder" puts a definition to a feeling that has before been very hard to describe in the past. The definition being; Sonder; n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk. Now this definition is quite obviously not something you would find in Websters dictionary. That is because Sonder is not in fact a real word, but rather a made up one used to describe the indescribable.      This all being said I find it very important that before I judge another person, I take into consideration what the person's secret inside world might be like. What trials they may have gone through that made them into the person they are today. The hardest, meanest individuals may have been made this way due to a lifetime of hardship that has caused their inside worlds to become a darker place. People who you consider "strange" or "weird" might simply have very different worlds from your's, leaving you little room to judge.       Although I myself still struggle with this as everyone else does, I try to make it a point  to not harshly judge others until I have heard their story and figured out why they are the person they are today. Through this I have discovered that many people I judged harshly at first are some of the most remarkable people I have ever met.  Everyone has been through their own hardships and has their own story to tell; so think before you judge.  -Ellen