Ordinary people who share their stories.

There are many ways to connect with people in order to expand our empathy and understanding of others. One of the most powerful ways is when ordinary people add their voices to what pundits, celebrities and well-known people say. They are often putting themselves on the line, opening themselves up to possibly being misunderstood and even excoriated for telling their experience, for sharing their feelings and their lives. They may well have kept these things, which are often painful or difficult, to themselves. When they share these things publicly, even close friends or family members may be surprised. It takes true bravery to open yourself up, inviting empathy, but knowing you will not always receive it.

This can be as simple as being at a family gathering, listening uncomfortably as your cousin rails against women who have abortions as murderers, and then hearing your beloved aunt quietly speak up, revealing that she had an abortion many years ago.

This can be as public as a newspaper inviting readers to share their experiences—about having an abortion, or being a member of an ethnic or religious minority in a place where they may be the only one, or coming out as gay. You have to admire the courage of those who respond to this invitation, knowing that friends and family as well as strangers will see this, knowing that there will be comments which will be hateful as well as hopeful and supportive. You feel a personal connection to these ordinary people telling their stories. And you read another story, and another, from all kinds of people—a grandmother, a science teacher, an emergency room doctor, a restaurant worker, a guy who grew up in a small town much like the one you grew up in.

Sometimes movements spring up around an issue that has come to the forefront of national attention, something that cries out for many voices to be added to the discussion. The #MeToo movement is an excellent example of this. No doubt, many women have talked privately amongst themselves for a long time about men who sexually harass them at work, in school, at their place of worship, in their neighborhood. Everywhere, really. But as we saw when the #MeToo movement started in 2006, it exploded on social media because women were longing to share the truth of their experiences, and to validate and support each other. Many people had the jolting experience of seeing the hashtag #MeToo on a friend’s Facebook page, and going to them saying “I didn’t know. Tell me about it.”  The Harvard Kennedy School of Business did a case study called “Leading with Empathy: Tarana Burke and the Making of the Me Too Movement.” A million different voices singing together can be incredibly powerful.

There will be similarities, and also individual differences, to the stories ordinary people tell, the experiences they share, which gives a depth and layer of complexity to something that is usually talked about or thought about only in generalities. There is truth in details. Adding many stories, many perspectives, gives us a bigger, clearer picture, a more empathetic view. It’s kind of like a photo mosaic. From a distance, it looks like one picture. But step in, look more closely, and you will see the thousands of tiny pictures that create the one big one.