Sometimes I look around and feel that everyone has something to say, yet very few people are truly listening. It often feels like everyone is speaking at once - opinions, arguments, judgements, and certainty everywhere. In all of that, truth doesn’t really disappear; it just becomes harder to hear.
Over the years, sitting with people and listening to their stories, I have realised something quite simple. What we see on the surface is only a small part of what people are actually carrying.
A lot of the time, anger is just fear or pain that doesn’t have a proper way out. Distance, too, is not always what it looks like - sometimes it’s just someone trying to protect themselves. And what we call “carelessness” or even “rudeness” is, at times, simply a person holding on to their own peace.
I think we forget that too easily.
We don’t always need to judge people so quickly. It helps more to pause a little, to look again, and to understand that behaviour is rarely simple. People are complicated in ways we don’t always see immediately.
And when you look at life today, this becomes even more obvious.
Work is no longer just work for many people. Somewhere along the way, it started becoming identity. Rest now comes with guilt attached to it, as if slowing down is some kind of failure.
And underneath all of this is perfectionism - especially for women. There is this quiet expectation to be everything at once. Calm, strong, successful, available, composed, all at the same time. And even when women manage all of that, there is still this feeling of not being enough. It builds slowly. Quietly. And it exhausts people more than they admit.
What I also see - and this is something that is not always easy to say - is that women don’t always find enough support in each other. Sometimes it’s comparison, sometimes it’s conditioning, and sometimes it’s just old habits passed down without even realising. But it creates distance where there could have been understanding.
And honestly, women grow differently when those shifts occur - when they stop comparing so much and start standing beside each other instead.
Sometimes even a small interruption is enough to break a pattern. One person who simply refuses to participate. One moment where someone says, “No, this is not okay.” It doesn’t feel big at that moment, but sometimes that is exactly how change begins.
Healing, from what I have seen, doesn’t happen in big dramatic moments. It’s slow. Repetitive. Almost invisible most of the time. It looks like someone slowly learning not to fight themselves every day.
And I don’t think people really change through criticism or shame. I think they change when they are seen properly, when they don’t feel the need to defend who they are anymore. Accountability matters, yes, but understanding is what actually opens the door.
Right now, the world feels unstable in so many ways - politically, socially, emotionally. It’s very easy to stay in fear.
But history has always shown something quiet but consistent: even after long periods of conflict, people eventually move back toward peace. Not because everything suddenly gets fixed, but because people reach a point where division simply becomes too heavy to carry anymore.
Maybe what we are living through is just another shift. Another turning of the page. And in times like this, it helps to remember that we are not only watching the world, we are also part of it and shaping it in small ways without even realising.
It is easy to feel small. But small doesn’t mean powerless.
It’s the small things that matter most anyway - what we allow, what we ignore, what we laugh at, what we quietly refuse.
If I leave this column with one thought, it is this:
People are not only their worst moments, either. And they are not as strong as they sometimes look when they are hiding pain.
Most people are just trying to get through life without losing themselves completely.
And if we can remember that, something in the way we look at each other changes.
- Dr Malini Saba
Managing Editor, LA Evolution Magazine
