The Space Between Us
On judgment, curiosity, and the strength of meeting each other where we are
You’re in the middle of a conversation, and someone mentions something you’re unfamiliar with.
Maybe it’s a trending song, a bit of history, a current event, a term everyone else seems to know—whatever. You admit you’re unfamiliar, expecting to learn.
But instead of an explanation, there’s a pause. A look. Maybe a laugh or a sigh. And suddenly it’s not about the thing anymore—it’s about you not knowing it. You feel the judgment. Even if no actual malice was intended, there’s a presumption in the air. About who you are, what you care about, what kind of person you must be.
It’s not just a gap in knowledge—it feels like an attack on your identity.
Maybe you don’t even admit it. Not because you want to be dishonest, but because you’ve felt this before—enough times for the shame to creep in, for the fear of judgment to tighten the space where curiosity might’ve lived. Sometimes it’s easier to nod along than to risk the weight of that judgment.
And yet most of us know the opposite feeling, too. The joy of open conversation, where learning is safe, even exciting. The long talks with a best friend that flow and wander through ideas without fear of looking ignorant. The heart-to-hearts with family. The late-night drunk or high or sleep-deprived conversations that turn unexpectedly profound. The relief when you finally find the words to explain to your partner the shape of something you’ve been struggling with—and they actually get it.
Those moments change you, not because the other person gave you the answer, but because they met you without judgment.
That openness doesn’t have to be reserved for our closest people. The depth and detail might belong to them, but the lack of judgment doesn’t have to. The difference between family and stranger isn’t empathy—it’s context.
Once judgment enters the conversation, curiosity has a hard time surviving. Even when that person across from you is right—when the thing they think you should know is important—that moment of presumption does more to harden the ground than to plant anything in it.
I’ve been on both sides of this. I’ve been the one shrinking in the space between what I knew and what they assumed I should. I’ve also been the one holding the assumption, convinced that because something mattered deeply to me, it should matter equally to everyone else—and in the same order.
That kind of certainty can feel righteous. But priorities aren’t neutral. They’re shaped by access, experience, bandwidth, and the sheer accident of what has crossed your path when. Treating them as universal isn’t moral clarity—it’s an erasure of all that complexity.
And when we moralize unawareness, the judgment itself can start to feel like the moral act. Calling it out becomes proof of our commitment. We mistake the performance for the outcome, and the performance begins to sustain itself. But nothing actually changes except the space between us.
Sometimes we tell ourselves this is necessary—that the stakes are too high for patience, that only sharpness will cut through. And yes, there are moments when you stand your ground and refuse to yield to oppression, discrimination, or manipulation. Never back down to those things. But that’s not what this is about. This is about the intellectual compromise of presuming you know why someone doesn’t know—and the moral compromise of justifying harm in kind. Those are not strengths. They hollow out the values they claim to defend.
The truth is, this kind of openness isn’t weakness. It’s the opposite. Patience and empathy in the face of harm aren’t passivity—they’re acts of strength. They demand control, clarity, and a refusal to let fear or anger decide the shape of your values for you.
A self built this way can survive anything, because it isn’t dependent on the moment—it’s rooted from the inside out.
This alternative to judgment doesn’t need to be complicated. Meeting someone where they are without assuming you already know why they’re there. Letting go of the need to win the conversation right now, trusting that planting something small might matter more than forcing something big. Giving yourself room to miss the mark without deciding that makes the effort meaningless.
The conversations that have stayed with me aren’t the ones where I “won.” They’re the ones where the door stayed open—where urgency and empathy coexisted long enough for something real to take root. When we stop treating awareness as a moral baseline everyone should have already reached, curiosity has the space to grow. And people are far more likely to step into that space when it feels like an invitation, not a trial. ∞