🧚 TREE 493: It’s harder to believe than not to
I’m driving my son to primary school – my toddler daughter is in the car with us – and up ahead of me cars start rear-ending each other. I hit the brakes and manage to stop in time. I looked in my rearview mirror and see the car behind me isn’t going to stop in time. Everything slows down and I think:
This is going to be bad for my kids’ necks.
If I take my foot off the brake, my car will offer less resistance to the car that’s hitting us and we won’t be hurt so badly.
I take my foot off the brake. The car smashes into the back of my car hard enough to give us a big jolt. My car rolls forward into the car in front, bounces back a little and the car in back hits us again, pushing us into the car in front for a second time. Giving my car the ability to roll saved us all from very sore necks.
This is an absolutely true story.
No one who mattered believed it.
The person in front felt two smashes. They went for the obvious interpretation: I crashed, then the guy behind me crashed. I don’t know what the the person behind me thought happened, but they swore to the police and their insurance company that they didn’t hit me twice. The police didn’t believe me. Fortunately, they weren’t issuing tickets. The insurance companies couldn’t comprehend that I would have the presence of mind to take my foot off the brake to protect my kids.
My insurance went up a few pounds a year and I had to get a new car, but the think that annoyed me for years was that no one believed me.
If not being believed about an inconsequential thing like that can have a big impact, imagine not being believed about
autoimmune disease,
depression,
sexism,
racism,
bullying,
abuse
or any of the myriad other true things that people naturally disbelieve and dismiss as all-in-your-head, not-so-bad, exaggerated or outright lies.
I don’t lie about what I’ve experienced. You probably don’t either. I think very few people do. But when humans learn about something that is too far outside their own experience, they struggle to believe it.
Try to believe people the way you would like to be believed.
You might not believe me if I told you what this is.
This is a rare cover of a deep cut from an 80s album of which the most popular track has fewer than 80,000 streams on Spotify.
Grow slowly
Jeff