The People Who Witness Us

Self-verification theory holds that human beings seek confirmation of who they believe themselves to be—and that this isn’t vanity but a hunger for coherence. We spend enormous energy managing the gap between how we’re perceived and who we feel we are. When someone sees us accurately, that labor stops. The gap closes. For a moment, we don’t have to convince anyone of anything. That, I think, is why being truly seen feels less like flattery and more like relief.

Bob had a way of doing this that I keep returning to. When he wrote about my book, he didn’t reach for the usual blurb language; he said reading it felt like going on a journey with a friend whose honest reckoning with life and death stirred the same reflections in him about his own. He’d let the book do something to him, and he admitted it.

He did the same on the podcast, where he confessed that he’d first assumed I was an atheist when in fact I’m agnostic—and that he hadn’t had much respect for atheists until he read my book. A strange, backhanded, wonderful thing to say. It landed because it was specific. He hadn’t filed me into a category. He’d read me, gotten me slightly wrong, corrected himself, and let the encounter change something in him.

There was a smaller moment, too. At my launch, mid-speech, I did the thing writers do—I minimized the book, waved it off, got self-deprecating. Bob interrupted me. He wanted it on the record that the book was very good. Period. The man who had just called it extraordinary would not sit there and watch me shrink it.

Most writers spend years sending signals into the world without knowing where they land. We sit alone with ideas and questions, publish them, and hope they reach someone. Usually, we never find out. Occasionally, the signal reaches a person whose own work has already become part of our internal landscape—and when that person answers, it can feel almost surreal. Not because it validates the work. Because it validates you.

Looking back, I notice that some of the most important people in my life arrived exactly this way. People who appeared briefly and altered my trajectory. Erik Erikson named a stage of late development generativity—the desire to nurture those who come after us. The healthiest elders, he suggested, become gardeners; they invest in futures they may never see. Bob embodied that, not only through his scholarship but through his readiness to encourage someone he’d only recently met. He always looked you in the eye with a bright smile, as if the conversation in front of him were the only one that mattered.

I suspect most of us are carrying invisible pieces of people who shaped us. A sentence from a teacher. A book that arrived at the right moment. A person who saw something in us before we saw it ourselves. They become part of the hidden structure holding up our lives, and we rarely think about them.

Until they’re gone. Then suddenly we see the beams, the pillars, the supports that helped us become who we are. Death has a strange way of revealing what life concealed; the architecture becomes visible only when one of its supports is removed.

So today I’m grateful—not only for Robert Thurman’s life, but for what his death makes visible. None of us truly knows the effect we have on others. A conversation we barely remember may become someone’s turning point. A refusal to let someone minimize their own work may outlast the person who refused.

We move through the world believing our influence is measured by our achievements. Maybe it’s measured by something quieter—how clearly we manage to see the people who cross our path, and whether, in being seen, they get to set down for a moment the weight of explaining themselves.

Bob saw me. He looked me in the eye, smiled, and wouldn’t let me shrink.