A friend once told me about a sign in someone’s bathroom that read, “It’s not about you.” There’s something deeply human about being reminded of that while sitting in the most humbling room in the house, forced into stillness, facing the most basic truths of being alive.

That phrase it’s not about you has come up again and again in my life. I used it once in a conversation with that same friend while we were driving, after he made a comment about a heavily tattooed woman. I don’t remember his exact words, just the general tone, mild judgment, maybe discomfort. Tattoos weren’t for him. And that’s the point. They weren’t.

I reminded him about the bathroom plaque and used it to drive home a simple truth: her tattoos weren’t about him. Her body wasn’t about him. Her choices, her hair, her clothes, none of it was crafted for his approval or designed to provoke his reaction. She was expressing herself in the way that felt most authentic to her, in a world that still struggles to understand outward expression. He didn’t have to like it. He just had to recognize that it wasn’t his to like.

I think something in that conversation shifted for him. At the time, he was pretty against tattoos in general. But last I knew, he had some of his own, a pretty big piece, I think. Maybe it was just a change of heart over time. Or maybe, just maybe, he came to understand that other people expressing who they are has no reflection on who he is. That you cannot be reflected in something you’re not mirroring, nor are you meant to be.

And maybe, the moment we truly turn inward, when we stop measuring ourselves against the choices of others, when we stop centering our own comfort in someone else’s existence, that’s when we become free. That’s when self-reflection becomes the only thing that matters. That’s when we get to be fully ourselves, and in doing so, we finally learn to let other people be fully themselves, too.