Just because we're close, doesn't mean you know me.
There’s this quiet assumption people carry around—that if they’re close to you, they know you.
Not just “know of you.”
Not just “know your habits.”
But know you.
As in: the full landscape. The whole map. Every hill, every back road, every strange little side path you wander down at two in the morning when the rest of the world is asleep.
And that assumption is… wrong.
Not in a cruel way. Not in a disappointing way.
Just in a very human, very ordinary, very unavoidable way.
I started thinking about this the other day when it hit me—if I lined up the people closest to me and asked them to list my interests, my obsessions, the things I spend my time thinking about when no one’s watching…
They’d all give me answers.
And they’d all be incomplete.
Not one of them would be wrong.
But not one of them would be whole either.
Let’s start with my mom.
She’s my ride or die. The one who knows the real stories, not the polished versions. The one who has seen me at my worst and didn’t flinch. The one who knows where the bodies are buried—and has enough context to understand why they’re there in the first place.
If anyone has earned the right to say they know me, it’s her.
And still… even she doesn’t know everything I’m into.
Not because I’ve hidden it from her. Not because there’s some great divide between us.
But because life doesn’t naturally unfold in a way where every curiosity, every interest, every strange little intellectual fixation gets reported back like a status update.
Some things just… stay quiet.
Then there are my friends.
I’ve got four people I’d put in that category without hesitation. The kind of people you don’t have to explain yourself to. The kind of people who can walk into your space, sit down, and just exist with you without performance.
And even there—no complete picture.
Some of them don’t even know each other, which already tells you something. These friendships were built in different seasons of my life, under different circumstances, with different versions of me at the center.
Not fake versions. Not masks.
Just… context-specific truths.
Who I am with one person isn’t a lie to the others. It’s just not the same slice.
My kids?
They get the version of me that holds the structure together. The one that makes sure things run, that shows up, that keeps the world from wobbling too much under their feet.
They don’t need the rest of it.
They don’t need to know what rabbit holes I disappear into when the house is quiet. They don’t need the full inventory of my thoughts, interests, or intellectual obsessions.
That’s not distance. That’s parenting.
And relationships—past and present—are probably the clearest example of this phenomenon.
If you put my ex-husbands and my current husband in the same room and had them compare notes about me, you’d see it unfold in real time.
There would be overlap, sure.
But then there would be these moments—these pauses—where someone realizes there’s a whole aspect of me they never encountered.
“…Wait. She was into that?”
Yes. Yes, she was.
You just weren’t there for that part.
Take something simple.
No one knew I was working toward a legitimate doctorate.
Not in any real, serious sense.
There was no announcement. No big declaration. No running commentary about the process.
It was just… something I was doing.
Quietly. Consistently. Intentionally.
Not because it was a secret, but because it didn’t need to be a spectacle.
Or my obsession with Civil War history.
And not the broad, polished, textbook version.
I’m talking about the women. The ones who operated in the margins. The ones who carried information, who smuggled, who observed, who passed messages through spaces where they were never meant to hold power—and used that underestimation to their advantage.
That kind of interest doesn’t come up naturally.
There’s no moment in casual conversation where someone says,
“So what are you into lately?”
and you respond with,
“Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about covert communication networks used by women in 19th-century wartime environments.”
People blink. The conversation moves on. You talk about something else.
And so those interests stay… where they are.
This is where the misunderstanding creeps in.
We tend to believe that if something isn’t shared, it must be hidden. That if we don’t know something about someone, it’s because they chose not to tell us.
But most of the time, it’s not that intentional.
It’s just that human beings are layered in a way that doesn’t always translate into conversation.
Not everything fits into a story.
Not everything has a natural entry point.
Not everything needs to be spoken out loud to be real.
If I asked everyone in my life to sit down and write out who they think I am—what I care about, what I’m interested in, what I spend my time doing—they would all give me answers they believe in.
And those answers would reflect real experiences with me.
But they would still only be partial.
Because each person only has access to the version of me that existed in their presence.
And here’s the part that’s taken me a while to really settle into:
That’s not a problem.
That’s not a gap that needs to be filled.
That’s not something to fix.
There’s a quiet kind of ownership in knowing that parts of you exist without being cataloged by anyone else.
That your interests don’t need validation to matter.
That your pursuits don’t need witnesses to be worthwhile.
That who you are isn’t dependent on how well someone else can describe you.
It doesn’t make you distant.
It doesn’t make you secretive.
It just makes you… whole.
So no—my mom doesn’t know everything I’m into.
Neither do my friends.
My kids.
The people who have loved me.
The people who still do.
And that’s not a sign that something is missing.
It’s a sign that there’s more.
And there’s something quietly comforting in that.
Because at the end of the day, no matter how well you are known…
There should still be parts of you that belong only to you.
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