A Conversation about identity, acceptance, and the quiet ways our experiences of belonging shape who we become.
There are lives we know mostly from the outside.
We know what someone does. Where they come from. The things they have achieved. The people who know them. The photographs that remain.
Sometimes, we know their story because the world has watched them grow.
Jayden Adams was one of those people.
He grew up in Cloetesville and found his way into professional football through Stellenbosch FC. From there came Mamelodi Sundowns, Bafana Bafana, and eventually the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
For a young South African footballer, it was a remarkable journey.
But a life is rarely made only of the things the world gets to celebrate.
There were losses along the way. His childhood friend Oshwin Andries died in 2023. During the World Cup, his grandmother Marianna died on June 17, a day before the decisive match that would help South Africa progress.
He played on.
South Africa reached the knockout stages of the World Cup for the first time.
And then, in July 2026, came the news of Jayden’s death at the age of 25.
An inquest was opened, and the circumstances surrounding his death remained under investigation.
There is a temptation, when someone dies young, to look backwards and search their life for clues.
To examine the photographs.
The interviews.
The moments that now seem significant.
To ask whether we missed something.
But perhaps there is another question beneath that one.
How much of another person’s life can we ever really see?
We can know someone’s history without knowing their experience of it.
We can know what they have survived without knowing what it cost them.
We can see someone laughing without knowing what the laughter means.
We can see someone carrying on without knowing what carrying on feels like.
We tend to think that when something is deeply wrong, it should become visible.
But a person can continue moving through an ordinary day while experiencing that day very differently from everyone around them.
This is part of what makes depression so difficult to understand from the outside.
It can affect the way a person experiences pleasure, energy, concentration, connection, and even the world around them.
And yet there may be no visible change in the room they are sitting in.
The people may still be there.
The responsibilities may still be there.
The life may still look, from the outside, like itself.
So what happens when life becomes difficult to inhabit?
And perhaps, beside it, another question we rarely ask with enough humility:
How much of another person’s inner world can we really see?
There is a difference between looking at a life and living it.
From the outside, a morning is a morning.
The alarm rings. The sun comes up. People leave for work. Messages arrive. The world carries on.
But what if the world has not changed, and yet your experience of it has?
The room is still the room.
The people you love are still there.
The things you once cared about have not necessarily disappeared.
And yet something has shifted.
A song that once moved you may leave you untouched.
A conversation that once felt easy may require an effort you cannot explain.
Tomorrow, once filled with possibilities, may feel strangely distant.
This is one of the things phenomenology asks us to notice – the world we share is not always the world we experience.
Two people can sit in the same room and inhabit very different realities.
From the outside, we may see the circumstances of a person’s life and wonder –
But you have so much going for you.
And perhaps they do.
That doesn’t tell us what it feels like to be them.
Maybe this is one of the great limits of being human.
We can see another person’s face.
We can hear their words.
We can know their history.
But we can never completely enter their experience.
We can only approach it.
Through listening.
Through attention.
Through the humility of admitting:
I may not know what this feels like for you.
And perhaps that is where understanding begins.
Perhaps there is another difficulty in seeing one another.
We tend to think of a person as an individual.
Their thoughts are theirs.
Their problems are theirs.
Their life is theirs to manage.
When something is wrong, we ask what is happening inside them.
But no one lives entirely inside themselves.
We become ourselves among other people.
Someone remembers us when we have forgotten.
Someone notices when our voice sounds different.
Someone knows the version of us that existed before the world knew our name.
Someone sits beside us without needing us to explain everything.
Ubuntu offers another way of seeing it – we do not become ourselves alone.
Perhaps its significance becomes clearer when someone is suffering.
Because being surrounded by people and being seen by people are not necessarily the same thing.
You can live in a crowded house and feel alone.
You can have hundreds of contacts and nowhere to put your truth.
You can be deeply loved and still find it difficult to say what is happening inside you.
And communities are not always places of understanding.
Sometimes they carry us.
Sometimes they ask too much of us.
Sometimes they make room for vulnerability.
Sometimes they teach us to hide it.
So perhaps the question is not simply whether we have people around us.
Perhaps it is –
What kind of relationships allow a person to remain fully human when they are not doing well?
The answer may begin with something very small.
To notice.
To listen.
To resist deciding that we already know.
Because if no person exists entirely alone, perhaps no person’s suffering does either.
There are moments when what we are feeling seems to become who we are.
Fear changes the way we see ourselves.
Grief can make yesterday feel like another life.
Exhaustion can make us wonder whether we have always been this tired.
And when a difficult state lasts long enough, it can become difficult to imagine ourselves outside of it.
The Bhagavad Gita begins, interestingly, not with certainty, but with a person who cannot see his way forward.
Arjuna stands in the middle of a life he knows, among people he knows, facing a moment he has been prepared for – and yet something within him has changed.
The world is still there.
But he is no longer meeting it in the same way.
Perhaps that is why the question that follows is larger than the particular crisis before him.
If the mind changes, what happens to the person?
If fear comes and goes, is the person who is afraid the whole person?
If sorrow arrives and stays for a while, does sorrow become an identity?
If our thoughts change from one season of life to another, which of those thoughts is truly us?
The Gita offers a distinction worth sitting with – there is the changing experience of life, and there is the deeper question of the one who experiences it.
We do not have to settle that question here.
Perhaps it is enough to notice how easily we confuse a passing state with a permanent self.
I am afraid can quietly become:
I am a fearful person.
I am struggling can become:
This is who I am.
I cannot imagine tomorrow can become:
There is no tomorrow for me.
But perhaps there is a space between an experience and an identity.
A space where we can say:
This is what I am experiencing.
Without having to decide:
This is all that I am.
Maybe that distinction matters most when life becomes difficult to inhabit.
Not because it makes the difficulty disappear.
But because it leaves open a question that pain can make very hard to ask –
What if the state I am in is real, but it is not the whole of me?
Perhaps one of the strangest things about being in pain is what it can do to tomorrow.
The future is still there.
The calendar has not changed.
There are still mornings that have not arrived.
There are still conversations that have not happened.
And yet possibility can become difficult to feel.
Not because the future has necessarily changed.
Because the person looking toward it has.
When possibility feels open, tomorrow can pull us towards it.
When possibility contracts, tomorrow can become difficult to imagine.
From the outside, we may see opportunities.
A person may not be able to experience them as possibilities.
We may see a door.
They may only see a wall.
It is tempting to tell someone what they should be able to see.
To remind them of everything they have going for them.
To point towards tomorrow and say:
Look. There is still so much ahead.
Perhaps there is.
But what if seeing possibility is itself part of what has become difficult?
Maybe this is why we should be careful with another person’s future.
We do not know what tomorrow looks like from where they are standing.
And perhaps we do not need to.
Perhaps sometimes it is enough to leave a little room around the unknown.
To resist deciding what another person’s story must become.
To remember that the present, however convincing it feels, is still only the place from which we are looking.
The future has not happened yet.
What might we notice if we took more time to listen, rather than assume we understand?
Join the conversation.
