By Jill Szoo Wilson
Writer | Theatre Artist | Educator

Two days before opening night in Norfolk, Virginia, I sat in an empty theatre watching Sandy Duncan play Emily Dickinson in The Belle of Amherst. I was the assistant director. Valentine Mayer was directing.

Bonus points if Duncan’s name immediately conjured images of Peter Pan flying high above a Broadway stage.

The theatre was empty except for the few of us working on the production. I had heard Dickinson’s name all my life, of course, but sitting there while Sandy Duncan spoke the poems aloud changed the way I heard them. They stopped feeling like literature I was supposed to admire and became something personal. Certain lines stayed with me long after the production closed. Years later, I would find them returning at unexpected moments, already woven into the way I understood my own life.

That is one of the strange gifts of art. Someone who died more than a century before you were born can leave a sentence behind, and one random Tuesday, someone walks away from you, puts on their glasses, or a slant of light falls through the blinds, and suddenly a line from someone else’s imagination fills the room. “Ah,” you think. “That’s what she meant.”

Years after I worked with Duncan, another writer’s line casually stopped me in my tracks. The setting was much less reverent. I was watching Mad Men on Netflix when Don Draper said:

“When a man walks into a room, he brings his whole life with him. He has a million reasons for being anywhere, just ask him.”

A person walks through a doorway and, to everyone else, the evidence is fairly limited. A coat. A voice. A posture. Maybe a high school or college ring. Tired eyes. A laugh that only involves the teeth and lips, but not the eyes.

But he did not begin at the doorway.

He has a first day of school somewhere behind him. A kitchen table where somebody once hurt his feelings. A song he cannot hear without remembering a particular summer. A person he still misses. A humiliation that returns whenever something brushes against it. A joke his father used to tell. A decision he wishes he could make again.

You can’t see any of that when he walks into the room. His past came in with him, but most of it remains hidden. We see what he chooses to show us in the moment, along with whatever he accidentally reveals.

We meet people in the middle.

I picture a human life as a kaleidoscope. Turn it slightly, and the pieces fall into a new arrangement. The same bits of colored glass remain inside, but the pattern changes with every movement.

Someone received wonderful news yesterday and hasn’t told anyone yet. Someone else barely slept. A sentence spoken twenty years ago still shapes the way one woman hears a sentence spoken today. The person standing beside you in the grocery store may be remembering a hospital room while deciding between two brands of coffee.

We rarely know.

And yet we are remarkably quick to finish other people’s stories for them.

We decide why someone was quiet at dinner. Why he never married. Why she changed careers. Why a friendship ended. Why somebody believes what he believes. We take the handful of facts available to us and build the missing rooms ourselves.

The kinder thing is to leave the door open.

Ask.

How did you end up here?

What happened next?

What was that like?

What do you remember?

Then listen long enough for the answer to become more interesting than the one you had already invented.

I still think about that empty theatre. Sandy Duncan stood onstage speaking the words of a woman born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830. Dickinson could never have imagined that room in Norfolk or the woman sitting in it more than a century later. Still, something crossed the distance.

A life entered another life.

The same thing happens when we become genuinely curious about another person. For a few minutes, we stop treating the visible surface as the whole story.

Someone walks into a room.

He has a million reasons for being there.

Ask him.

© Jill Szoo Wilson, 2026