My brother and I were talking. I mentioned having an inner monologue in my head and he called this mental illness which completely caught me off guard.
I have known my brother my entire life and it was fascinating that something that I thought was the default and that I experience every day is something that he would consider to be mental illness.
I was also shocked when he told me that he didn’t have an inner monologue.
It made me think about how often we like to judge other people based on our own experiences and contexts.
The problem with this is that the way people perceive the world is extremely different. We may appear to be similar but if you dig beneath the surface, you would realize just how different our experiences of the world can be.
And so, one way to easily improve relationships I think is to genuinely be interested in other people, to ask questions about how they experience the world, to withhold judgement, and to avoid the default assumption of trying to assume what is correct for other people to do based on ideals most applicable to your unique context.