Why Does Everyone Else Think They’re Wonderful?

Why does everyone else think they’re wonderful?

It is one of the loneliest questions I hear. The person you live with is funny at the wedding. They help a neighbour. They remember names. They are generous with other people’s children. Friends say you are lucky. Family says you are lucky. Sometimes you say you are lucky, because the public version is real enough to photograph, and your private version has no witness.

This is the fifth piece in *When Peace Depends on You*. If the last article was about the fog inside a conversation, this one is about the fog outside it — the gap between the person the village meets and the person you meet when the door is shut.

Both versions can be true

I need to say this early, because people in this position often think they have to destroy the public image in order to be believed. You do not. A person can be genuinely helpful at work and eroding at home. They can be tender with a parent and contemptuous with you. Charm is not always a mask in the cinematic sense. Sometimes it is a real skill that simply is not aimed at you.

The isolation comes when other people only have access to the skill, and you are left holding the rest. If you try to describe the rest, you sound ungrateful. You sound like you are talking about someone else. You start to edit your own stories until they are mild enough to be plausible, and in the editing you lose the truth again.

• Compliments about them make your stomach tighten rather than swell with pride
• You have stopped correcting the public story, because it is exhausting and you will not be believed
• You feel crazy for being unhappy when “anyone would want what you have”
• You perform the happy couple in the street and drop the performance in the car
• You wonder whether you are the problem, because the evidence everyone else has looks so good

If that list is familiar, I want you to hear a sentence I say often in the room: you do not need everyone else to see it before your experience matters.

Why people take their side without meaning to

Most of your friends are not choosing them over you. They are choosing the version they have been given. We all do this. We meet a charming person for two hours and we fill in the rest with generosity. In a small country that filling-in is everywhere — the colleague, the cousin, the priest, the mother who “always liked him”. Their goodwill is not a verdict on your marriage. It is a verdict on a performance they were never invited to see the end of.

There is another layer. If you have been the peacekeeper, you may have protected their image yourself. You made excuses. You laughed things off. You said “he’s just tired” or “she’s under pressure”. You did that out of loyalty, or fear, or hope. Then, when you needed someone to see you, the world believed the story you helped write. That is a particular kind of loneliness. It is also not proof that you invented the private version.

On an island this size, the public version has a long shelf life. You will meet it at the grocer, at a baptism, in a comment under a photograph. Each encounter can nudge you back toward “maybe it is me”. Hold the two pictures without forcing them to collapse into one. The charming colleague and the person who leaves you unsure of your own evening can be the same adult. Your job is not to convince the village. Your job, if you take one up, is to stop abandoning the witness you already have — yourself.

You do not need everyone else to see it before your experience matters.

What this does to self-trust

When the public record contradicts the private one, many people conclude that they are the unreliable narrator. They double down on self-doubt. They work harder at being pleasant. They become even more isolated, because the one thing that would help — a witness — feels impossible to find.

A therapy room is, among other things, a witness that is not in the family system. At Vita Mea Clinic in Mosta, individual therapy is private. We will not contact your partner. We will not take a poll of your relatives. We will sit with the version you actually lived, including the parts that would sound disloyal at Sunday lunch.

That is not us “siding against” anyone. It is us refusing to let a public reputation outvote your nervous system. If later you want couples therapy, that is a separate decision, and it only works if both people can be present without using charm as a substitute for accountability. Many people never take that step. Many do not need to in order to get clearer.

A note on sharing this

This article is the one people most often send to a sister or a friend. If you are reading it because someone sent it to you: thank you for taking them seriously. You do not have to investigate their partner. You only have to leave a little room for the possibility that the private life and the public life are not the same country.

If you are the one who feels unseen: you are not required to convince the group chat. You are allowed to take your experience to a room that does not need a jury. Get in touch or call +356 9985 4942. Next in the series: Look at what has happened to your boundaries. Previous: Confusion can become a pattern.