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Hello, Friends!
I've been thinking about the people we decide we understand. Fair warning: there's a spreadsheet in this one, and a wizard.
We start here.
A few years ago, my parents came to stay for a weekend, and I spent almost none of it with them.
My business partner had asked me for a piece of data analysis that was well past what I knew how to do. I had told her that when she asked. I tried anyway, because that's what you do with a partner, and because I thought effort might close some of the gap. It didn't. I worked Friday night and most of Saturday, and I was still at it when the sun came up on Sunday, with my parents downstairs making coffee and being polite about the fact that I kept not appearing.
I sent it over and we got on a call so I could walk her through it.
She let me get about a minute in. Then: "This is all wrong. Do you even know how to create a pivot table? I'll just do it myself."
I didn't argue. I don't think I said much of anything. I remember watching myself decide not to respond, which is a strange thing to be aware of while it's happening. The call ended a few minutes later, and I sat there for a while, and then I cried. Then I went downstairs and had lunch with my parents, and then they left.
I tell you that not because it was the worst thing anyone has said to me at work. It wasn't close. I tell you because of what I had to decide about her in the hour after, and because I've been deciding it ever since.
Everyone who worked with her had a version of that call. It was not a secret that she was hard to be around. People traded stories about her the way you trade weather reports, and the stories all agreed, and the conclusion was always the same: that's just who she is.
I could have joined that. It would have been easier, and it would have been fair.
What I knew about her outside of work fit in a sentence. She was a mother. She was a wife. That was it; I had never been to her house, never met anyone who loved her, never seen her in a setting where she wasn't the one deciding whether something was all wrong. And yet those two facts kept getting in the way of the simple conclusion. Somebody married her. Somebody calls her at the end of the day. Whatever version of her showed up on my Sunday, it couldn't be the only version there was, because nobody's is.
So I made a decision, and it was a narrower one than it might sound. I did not decide she was secretly kind. I did not decide she had a hard childhood or a difficult boss of her own. I had no evidence for any of that and I didn't want to invent a biography for someone just to make her easier to forgive. What I decided was smaller: that she had a reason. That whatever this was, it had been built somewhere, by something, and that I was not going to be the one who got to see the blueprint.
Part of that was conviction. Part of it, if I'm honest, was survival. I had to work with her every day, and I could either work with a person who was cruel for no reason or a person who was guarded for one, and only one of those was a person I could keep showing up for.
The trouble is that a reason you assume is still a story. I told myself I wasn't making one up. I was. It was just a kinder one than the one everybody else was telling, and I had no more proof of mine than they had of theirs.
In the summer of 2011 I sat in a theater and watched the last Harry Potter film, and somewhere in the final half hour I felt something I wasn't prepared for, which was remorse.
I hadn't read the books yet. I came to those stories through the films, one every year or two, and that meant I had spent a decade forming an opinion of Severus Snape at the pace the movies let me. It was not a complicated opinion. He was petty. He was cruel. He played favorites and nursed grudges and seemed to enjoy the discomfort of children. Ten years of evidence, all of it pointing one direction, and I had drawn the obvious conclusion the same as everyone in the theater with me.
Then he dies, and as he's dying he hands over his memories, and the boy watches them, and the whole thing turns. The cruelty was real. It was also not the only thing there. Behind it was a grief he had never told anyone about and a promise he had spent his life keeping, badly, in the only way he knew how.
I had no idea it was coming. I sat there and felt the last ten years of my opinion of him fold in on itself, and what I was left with wasn't relief that he'd turned out to be better than I thought. It was something closer to shame. I had been so sure. And I had been wrong in the specific way you can only be wrong about someone whose reasons you never saw.
Here is what I keep coming back to, though, and it's the part that connects to the woman on my Sunday call. Snape never chose to be understood. He didn't sit the boy down and explain. He died, and his memories were taken from him in his last minutes, and only then did anyone get to see. The people he'd been unkind to for years never got that scene. They got the version he showed them, and they were right about it, and they were also missing most of the story, and there was no way for them to know.
That's the deal, almost always. The reveal comes in a book, or a film. In life, you get what someone is willing to show you, and you decide from there.
I never got that scene with her.
We worked together for a good while after that Sunday, and she never softened, and I never learned where any of it came from. No one confided in me. No memory got handed over. If there was a promise she was keeping badly, she kept it to herself, and I stopped expecting otherwise fairly early on.
But I did get one thing, and I almost missed it.
A few weeks after the call, I opened a file she'd sent around and recognized my own work in it. Not a trace of it. Most of it. The structure I'd built, the categories I'd chosen, the parts I'd stayed up all night on. She had taken what I made, fixed what was wrong with it, and kept going. She never mentioned it. She never said the thing I'd have wanted her to say, which was that it hadn't been all wrong after all.
I've thought about that file more than I've thought about the call. It wasn't a confession and it wasn't an apology. It was a spreadsheet. But it was the only evidence I ever got that the person on the phone and the person doing the work were not quite the same person, and that the second one had looked at what I brought her and found it worth building on. She was never going to tell me that. I found it in the next version of the work, with no note attached.
That's as close to the memories as I got. It's less than Harry got. It's more than most people get.
And it didn't change my decision, because the decision was never resting on it. I had already chosen to believe she had a reason, back on the Sunday, with nothing to go on. The spreadsheet didn't prove me right. It just made it a little easier to keep choosing.
There is someone in your life right now who has only ever shown you one version. You know the version well. You could describe it to a friend over dinner and the friend would nod, because everyone who has met this person has the same description, and the description is probably accurate.
I'm not going to tell you they're secretly wonderful. I don't know that. Neither do you. What I can tell you is that the description isn't the whole of anyone, and that you will almost certainly never be shown the rest, and that you still have to decide what to do with them tomorrow.
There's an old line about this, the one about never knowing what someone is going through. It's true and it's incomplete. It points at the present, at the thing that might be happening to a person this week that's making them short with you. Snape is the other half. Some of what people show you wasn't built this week. It was built years ago, by someone else, in circumstances you'll never hear about, and by the time it gets to you it doesn't look like a wound anymore. It looks like personality. Most of the people who are hard to be around are one of those or both, and from the outside you can't tell which, and it doesn't much matter, because your decision is the same either way.
You can decide they are exactly what they seem. That's fair, and often it's the safer call, and I won't argue with anyone who makes it.
Or you can decide, with no evidence, that there is a reason. Not for their sake. For yours, mostly, because it's hard to keep showing up for someone who is cruel for nothing, and slightly less hard to keep showing up for someone who is guarded for something.
My parents left after lunch that Sunday. I had lost most of a weekend with them to a spreadsheet that wasn't good enough, and I sat with them for that last hour and didn't say much about it. I've regretted the weekend. I haven't regretted what I decided about her.
I still don't know if there was more to her. I decided to believe it anyway, and I would again, because somewhere, someone is drawing a conclusion about the version I've shown them, and I'd like to think they're leaving a little space.
If this one landed, forward it to one leader who'd care. That's how The Human Leader Project grows.
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