'I thought I knew my closest friends. One word proved we're strangers.'

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This article originally appeared on Liv's Substack, Liv Jarrell. Sign up here.

I first heard the word sonder from a man on TikTok in 2020, an unlikely oracle, but he was crying, and I was listening.

He read the definition aloud like it had just shattered him: the realisation that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.

It stopped me mid-scroll. It made something soft inside me ache.

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I couldn't stop thinking about it. That moment — that word — latched onto something I had always felt but never known how to name.

It was like someone handed me a flashlight and aimed it toward the edges of my vision, illuminating a world I'd always suspected was there.

Suddenly, the woman walking briskly through the parking garage wasn't just late, she was carrying something. The barista handing over my coffee wasn't just tired, he was in the middle of something big, or hard, or tender. Every person I passed started to feel like a novel I'd never get to read.

There's a certain quiet violence in realising you'll never know most people deeply. You'll never see the little rituals that hold them together. Never hear the thing they say out loud when they're alone in the car. Never know how they feel about rain on Tuesdays, or whether they sleep with one leg out of the blanket, or who first taught them how to be kind.

The word 'sonder' transformed Liv's understanding of human connection and why we'll never truly know anyone. Image: Getty.

It's beautiful, in that aching way. But it's also a little tragic. All these full, complex lives crashing into each other for a moment — on sidewalks, in elevators, at gas stations — and then disappearing, entirely, into the stream of what-ifs and might-have-beens.

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Still, I can't help but look a little longer now. I find myself holding eye contact for half a second more than I used to. Not in a creepy way (I hope), but in that quiet, curious way that asks: Who are you when no one's watching?

And it's not just strangers who get me like this. It's my sister, too. We talk nearly every day, but sometimes I'll catch myself realising, truly realising, that she has an entire interior world I'll never fully enter.

She has her own thoughts looping in the shower. Her own people who made her laugh that week. Her own worries she might not voice because they sound too big or too small. We came from the same family, and yet, she's built a life with nuances and details and side characters that I know nothing about.

I feel it at work too. We log off our Teams calls and step back into these parallel universes — partners, kids, dogs, cluttered countertops, dinner plans, grief, mess, joy. Our Monday huddles only scratch the surface. We're all little icebergs in business-casual sweaters, revealing the smallest tip of what's really going on underneath.

Even my closest friends, my ride-or-dies, the ones who've seen me ugly cry and eat pasta out of a mug, I don't really know what their lives feel like from the inside. I don't know what they dream about when they're quiet. What memories still hum at the edges of their minds. What private joys they carry in their pockets like lucky charms.

"Every person I passed started to feel like a novel I'd never get to read." Image: Getty.

And somehow, that doesn't make our connection less meaningful. It makes it more. Knowing I'll never fully know anyone is what makes it feel like such a gift when someone lets me in, even a little.

When they tell me the thing they didn't post about. When they trust me with the part that doesn't make a good story. When they let me see the mess behind the metaphor.

I think that's what drives me to write. Not some lofty ambition to capture the human experience, but the nagging pull of it. The desire to make something out of all these brushed-past lives and unsaid things. To hold space for the stranger I'll never see again, the fleeting moment that tugged at my chest for no reason I could name. There's something sacred in noticing. And maybe something even more sacred in not knowing and still caring anyway.

Sonder reminds me that the world isn't built around me. That everyone is carrying their own epic, full of grief and joy and contradictions — and that, most of the time, I'll only ever get the briefest glimpse. But what a thing to glimpse.

So now, I try to soften when I can. I try to assume the best. I try to remember that everyone is starring in their own unspoken drama, showing up to work with a heart mid-break, or dancing in their kitchen after good news, or quietly surviving something no one else knows about.

We don't always get the full story. But we can still bear witness. We can still nod at the mystery of it all and say: I don't know you, but I see that you're here. And that's not nothing.

P.S. I still think about that TikTok guy sometimes. I hope he's doing okay. I hope whatever cracked him open that day let a little more light in, too.

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Feature Image: Getty.