Perhaps that’s what friendship can do: the presence of another indirectly giving us better access to the hidden parts of ourselves.

Perhaps to really know another person, you have to have a glimmer of how they

experience the world. To really know someone, you have to know how they know you.

Then you try to reidentify the mutual purpose of the conversation. That’s done by enlarging the purpose so that both people are encompassed by it.

Mentalizing also helps us simultaneously sympathize with a person while also detaching to make judgments about them.

As Maya Angelou once put it, “The more you know of your history, the more liberated you are.