Everyone carries a different gauge for what “normal” feels like.
For some people, normal means relatively calm waters. When something goes wrong—a flat tire, a flooded sink, an overdrawn account—it feels overwhelming because disruptions like that aren’t part of their everyday life.
Others live in very different terrain.
Their normal may include hospital rooms, seasons of uncertainty, repeated loss, or adversity that arrives in waves. After enough time standing in those storms, something inside recalibrates. Their gauge shifts.
What once might have registered as overwhelming begins to feel survivable.
Not because it doesn’t hurt.
But because life has trained them to carry heavier things.
And that’s where misunderstanding often begins.
When We Measure With the Wrong Gauge
It’s easy to watch someone react strongly to a problem that seems small to us and think:
I wish that was my everyday problem.
If we’re honest, most of us have had that thought at some point.
I know I have.
There have been moments when I’ve been standing eyeball-deep in my own muck and mire, carrying things that felt relentless, and listening to someone rant about not being able to get scheduled for a nail appointment.
And in that moment my first thought was something like,
My God… what in the actual hell?
It can feel impossible to understand how something so small could send someone else into a spiral when you’re carrying things that feel infinitely heavier.
But that reaction says more about the difference in our gauges than it does about the other person.
Because we aren’t standing in the same normal.
Strength or Desensitization?
Sometimes people look at someone who moves calmly through chaos and say,
“You’re incredibly strong.”
But often what they’re seeing isn’t strength in the way they imagine.
It’s familiarity.
When someone has spent years navigating difficult terrain, their nervous system adapts. Their gauge shifts upward. What once would have been a ten might barely move the needle now.
Meanwhile, someone whose life has been steadier may feel overwhelmed by something that seems minor by comparison.
Neither response tells the full story of who someone is.
It simply reflects the life that shaped their gauge.
The Problem With Comparing Storms
One of the biggest mistakes we make is measuring someone else’s adversity against the baseline of our own life.
We look at their reaction and think about how we would handle that same situation.
But that comparison rarely works.
Because we’re imagining their moment while standing inside our own experience, our own history, our own storms.
Their gauge was calibrated by a life we haven’t lived.
And ours was calibrated by one they haven’t lived either.
Getting Outside Our Own Box
If we truly want to support the people around us, we have to learn how to step outside our own box.
We can’t remain standing inside our own “normal” and expect to understand someone else’s struggle.
Support requires something more than that.
It asks us to step outside our own gauge and try to meet someone where their gauge is set.
Not where we think it should be.
Not where it would be for us.
But where it actually is for them.
Because you can’t truly support someone while standing inside your own comfort zone and evaluating their reaction from a distance.
Support begins when you’re willing to step into their world and say,
I see where you’re standing.
Slowing Down the Judgment
The challenge is that we live in a world that moves fast.
So fast that we’ve become conditioned to make quick judgments about everything—people, reactions, circumstances.
Someone reacts strongly and our instinct is comparison.
That wouldn’t bother me.
But empathy asks us to slow that instinct down.
To remember that we may not actually know the terrain someone else has been walking through.
The truth is, everyone’s life calibrates their gauge differently.
What barely moves the needle for one person might set off every alarm inside another.
And once we recognize that, comparison begins to lose its power.
Grace begins to take its place.
The Power of the Pause
Over time, I’ve learned something else that helps me step outside my own gauge.
I don’t respond immediately from emotion.
When something happens—when someone reacts strongly, or when I feel myself getting pulled into the moment—I pause.
I step back.
I breathe.
I allow the emotions of the moment to move through me instead of driving my response.
Because when we react purely from emotion, we’re almost always responding from inside our own gauge of normal.
And that’s rarely the place where understanding lives.
So I pause long enough to let the emotional reaction settle.
I breathe it out.
I clear the noise of the moment.
Then I step back into the situation with a little more clarity.
Not to dismiss what someone else is feeling, and not to dismiss what I’m feeling either—but to look at the circumstances honestly.
To respond from realism.
From truth.
From a place that allows me to help rather than simply react.
Because sometimes the most supportive thing we can offer someone isn’t an emotional reaction.
It’s a steady presence.
An Unexpected Gift of Stepping Outside Ourselves
Something else happens when we make the effort to step outside our own box and meet someone where they are.
It doesn’t just help them.
It helps us.
I’ve noticed that when I pause long enough to step outside my own stress and consider someone else’s perspective, something inside me settles.
The things I’m carrying don’t disappear.
The buckets are still there.
But somehow the weight becomes clearer. More defined. More manageable.
Instead of feeling swallowed by my own turmoil, I find myself standing beside it with a little more steadiness.
There’s a quiet clarity that comes with that shift.
A reminder that the world is bigger than the moment I’m standing in.
And strangely enough, that perspective can be healing.
Sometimes the very act of extending grace to someone else restores a little balance inside ourselves.
A Different Way to See Each Other
Maybe the goal isn’t to rank struggles.
Maybe the goal is simply to recognize that every person we encounter is standing somewhere inside their own version of normal.
Their reactions are shaped by a life we haven’t lived.
And the moment we remember that, something shifts.
Patience grows.
Understanding grows.
Compassion grows.
Because supporting someone doesn’t mean judging their reaction through the lens of our own life.
It means being willing to step outside our box long enough to meet them inside theirs.
We are all standing at different places on the scale of what life has asked us to carry.
And perhaps the most human thing we can do is extend a little more grace when someone else’s gauge of normal doesn’t look like our own.
When we step outside the box of our own experience—the place where bias quietly forms—we create space to meet people where they are.
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
— Viktor Frankl“Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love.”
— Ephesians 4:2
Striving in Truth.
Rooted in Love.
Soul Anchored in Grace.
Tina Noreen Campbell
Scribed in Light
Scribed In Light 
Leave a Reply