Beyond Our Own Experience

There is a way we sometimes respond to suffering that turns pain into a competition.

Someone tells us they are hurting, and we tell them how we have hurt too.

A group asks for protection, and we point toward another group we believe needs protection more.

Someone speaks about fear, discrimination, violence, or loss, and instead of staying with what they are telling us, we begin measuring.

Who has suffered more?

Who has been ignored longer?

Who deserves our attention first?

Whose pain matters most?

As though dignity is something we have to ration.

As though acknowledging one person’s experience somehow takes something away from another’s.

Sometimes we do it to ourselves, too. We decide our pain shouldn’t matter because someone else has it worse. Comparison can keep us from honoring another person’s experience, but it can also keep us from honoring our own.

It begins in the smallest spaces between us.

When We Hurt Each Other

Someone we love tells us that something we did hurt them.

And perhaps we are hurting too.

Perhaps they have hurt us deeply.

Both experiences can exist.

We can hear, This hurt me, without immediately responding with, Well, you hurt me too.

Acknowledging someone else’s wound does not erase our own.

Accountability can exist in more than one direction. Both experiences can have room without requiring either person to surrender theirs.

Sometimes advocacy begins that simply:

I can be hurting and still care that you are hurting.

When We Speak About Gender

Women talk about violence.

About safety.

About calculating where we park, who is walking behind us, whether someone knows where we are, how we get home.

And sometimes the response becomes a defense of men.

We aren’t all dangerous.

But someone describing the conditions under which they have learned to survive does not require every person outside that experience to defend themselves.

We can listen.

That willingness to listen and advocate can extend beyond our own experience.

Men can speak about loneliness, suicide, violence, fatherhood, isolation, or expectations surrounding masculinity, and those experiences can matter without becoming an argument against women.

We don’t need to decide whose experience has been hardest before caring.

Beyond Our Own Communities

Racial and ethnic communities speak about discrimination.

People with disabilities ask for access.

Immigrants ask to be treated with dignity.

And sometimes someone else’s protection is treated as though it comes at a cost to another group.

Rather than considering what a community is asking for, the conversation can shift toward whether their needs deserve attention, whether their protections are fair, or whose needs should matter more.

The focus turns sideways, toward other communities asking for dignity, rather than toward the conditions that leave anyone fighting to be treated as fully human.

Recognizing someone else’s dignity does not diminish our own.

We can advocate for what our communities need while standing beside others advocating for theirs.

In Matters of Faith

We can believe deeply in our right to worship.

To pray.

Or to have no religion at all.

Those same freedoms can be defended for someone whose beliefs bear no resemblance to our own.

When we believe our religious freedom has been violated, we can name the violation.

We can challenge it.

We can advocate for change.

We do not need to point to another religion’s freedom in order to argue for our own.

Their freedom is something worth protecting too.

Religious liberty means very little if we only value it when the religion being protected is our own.

Beyond Our Own Nation

When conflict divides people into sides, this instinct to measure suffering can become especially devastating.

People are killed.

Children suffer.

Families lose homes.

Communities lose schools, hospitals, food, history, places of worship, landmarks, and pieces of themselves that cannot simply be rebuilt.

And still, suffering gets measured.

A commitment to recognizing one population’s pain can become so strong that acknowledging another population’s devastation begins to feel like betrayal.

We do not need to share someone’s history, culture, religion, or nationality to recognize their suffering.

Compassion can extend to people on different sides of a conflict without pretending their circumstances are the same.

One group can be experiencing profound injustice while the suffering of others still matters.

Compassion does not require us to abandon our convictions.

It asks us not to abandon our humanity.

Advocacy can extend to people we have never met—people whose lives will never intersect with ours.

Their humanity is enough.

There Is Room

At its most human, advocacy asks us to resist the instinct to compete for compassion.

To recognize injustice even while carrying wounds of our own.

To want freedom for ourselves and still fight for someone else’s.

Another person’s pain does not erase ours. The rights of others do not diminish ours. Suffering does not have to resemble our own before we decide it matters.

Pain does not have to win a competition before it deserves our humanity.

Unfolded Reflections:

• How can I advocate for what I need without making someone else’s pain, rights, or freedom smaller?

• Do I allow my own pain to exist without needing to measure it against who has it better or worse?

• Where have I compared others’ suffering rather than allowing each experience to exist on its own?

May each fold carry you closer to yourself.

Resources to Explore:
Why You Minimize Your Pain by Comparing It to Others. (2026, Oct 8). https://www.reachlink.com/advice/defense-mechanisms/why-you-minimize-your-pain-by-comparing/

Taking care of yourself while advocating for others. https://mhanational.org/resources/taking-care-of-yourself-while-advocating-for-others/