The Unseen Difference You Make

Years ago, an article I wrote about a car accident I was in when I was 16 got published.

The article was about how I had some of my teeth knocked out in the accident and how I overcame my feelings about how I looked. It was a piece that went out during Chanukah with the theme of bringing your inner light to the surface.

When I hit the send button on my computer to the editor, I felt disappointed. I thought it wasn’t good enough and wouldn’t make any meaningful impact. I regretted submitting it. After all, what was the point of an article if I couldn’t make a difference with what I wrote?

Later, I put that article in the back of my mind.

Two years later, I received a Facebook message from a happily married woman with three kids who had been in a car accident and lost her two front teeth. She wrote that she knew she had a lot to be thankful for—a wonderful husband and three beautiful children—but nevertheless, she had fallen into a depression for three months over how she looked with her missing teeth.

Then, she happened upon my article. Suddenly, reading what I wrote snapped her out of her depressed state. She was messaging me to let me know how much she appreciated the article and how I had helped her.

It occurred to me that while I was disappointed that I hadn’t produced a perfect writing piece that would be sufficiently impactful, someone who went through something similar to what I went through read it, and it spoke to her. Somehow, my experience validated what she went through, and now she felt empowered to move on.

The thing is…I only saw this message two years after this woman wrote to me. I didn’t know it existed because I have my Facebook messages from non-friends set to a different notification. But what if I had never seen it at all? I would have never known that sharing my experience, however imperfect it seemed to me, made a difference to someone else.

I began to wonder how much of a difference we make in people’s lives without ever knowing it. For whatever reason, we just never find out.

But what if we woke up every day and acted with the mindset that we knew we were making a difference in countless ways—both seen and unseen—everywhere we go?

How different would our actions be?

Our thoughts?

Our mood?

Our relationships?

The truth is, it’s likely that right now you are making a positive impact in someone’s life, even if you’ll never know it.

And this is where our self-worth must stem from—not from perfection, but from the knowledge that we have much to offer in countless ways, simply by being who we are.

So embrace life confidently. Share yourself freely. Trust that your inner light, no matter how imperfect it may seem, is exactly what someone else needs to experience. When you live with this mindset, you will impact and illuminate the lives of others in ways you may never fully realize.