Released On 12 October 2026
Steph's blog: What You Don't See
“The world isn’t just the way it is. It is how we understand it,” writes Yann Martel in Life of Pi. I was reminded recently just how differently two people can interpret the exact same situation.
My family and I recently spent a weekend at a charity respite house for families of seriously ill and disabled children (a small plug for Demelza, an incredible charity which has done so much for us). Amongst the children there, my three-year-old daughter was quite possibly the liveliest. She runs, talks incessantly and can construct a logical argument that would make a lawyer nervous. If you didn’t know her, you might have reasonably assumed she was one of the least vulnerable children in the room.
You would also have been spectacularly wrong.
What isn’t immediately obvious is that the tube under her nose is delivering the oxygen she needs to stay alive. If that supply fails, the consequences aren’t somewhere in the distant future. So while someone else sees a three-year-old charging happily around a playroom, I see that too — but I also see the tube, the cylinder, the connections and all the ways something could go wrong.
This probably explains why other people occasionally see an unnecessarily highly-strung mother where I see an entirely rational risk-management function. Is the tube kinked? Has she caught it on something? How much oxygen is left? Where’s the spare cylinder? Did we just have a power cut? My brain has essentially become a permanently staffed risk department.
But it has also made me think about how often we do the same thing to other people. We observe behaviour without necessarily knowing the drivers behind it. Someone at work seems disproportionately worried about a small operational detail, so we think they’re being irrational. Someone continues delivering and meeting every deadline, so we assume they’re coping.
We see the output. We don’t necessarily see what it costs to produce it.
That distinction has become increasingly important to me. My daughter can be joyful, capable and profoundly medically vulnerable at exactly the same time. I can be functioning perfectly well at work while another part of my brain is running through oxygen supplies, hospital appointments and contingency plans. One reality doesn’t invalidate the other, but maintaining both is exhausting.
Perhaps Martel was right: the world isn’t just the way it is, but how we understand it. I’ve become much more cautious about assuming that what I can see is all there is to understand.
A child racing around a playroom can still be profoundly vulnerable. A colleague delivering everything asked of them can still be operating at their limit. And sometimes the person who seems disproportionately worried isn’t overreacting at all — they can simply see something you can’t.
So perhaps the lesson isn’t that we should all worry more. That sounds exhausting, and I have that covered. It’s to leave room for the possibility that our view of someone else’s reality is based on only the parts we can see.
Steph juggles a full time job in sustainable finance, 2 wonderful daughters aged 6 and 3 (the younger one is disabled and has a genetic lung disease), and a supportive husband. She lives in south London and works in the City.
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