She sees the woman slowly make her way towards her. As one of the organizers of the event, my friend stands as a makeshift receiving line forms in front of her. People comment on how well she did helping to plan the evening or mention their desire to become more active in the organization. One attendee asks how to donate then another tells my friend that she adores her outfit and asks where she bought her boots. Distractedly, my friend shares the store’s name – her brain focuses its energy on recalling how she knows the woman making a bee line for her.

Just as the woman’s face comes more clearly into view, my friend inhales sharply. She remembers and the panic takes hold of her chest, squeezing against her heart bucking inside, telling her fight or flight time approaches. The woman moves in front of my friend, smiling like the Cheshire Cat.

“I know who you are,” she says to my friend.

“And I know who you are,” my friend offers as the only acceptable reply.

“Do they know who you are?” The woman subtly gestures to the other people in the room with her chin.

“No, and I don’t think they need to.”

The woman cocks her head with interest at my friend’s reply then turns away, wearing her smug grin and satisfaction like trophies. Meanwhile, my friend fights every urge to run out of the room and straight home, managing to continue shaking hands and thanking people for their attendance. “I know who you are” echoes in her ears.

My friend fought hard to create her new life, escaping an unbelievable situation to free herself and her children so they could become better versions of themselves. The fact that she was the victim in the story mattered not to the people of the community she left and rumors abounded. Her job was not to stop or correct the rumors but to survive and move on.

The woman at the event came to town to visit friends and they brought her along to introduce her to their friends. Coincidence brought her to stand before my friend and threaten her. The woman felt she could wield power over my friend by calling her out and bringing forth her history. With five small words, she knew she could seize power over my friend’s emotions and bully her. Holding a shameful secret over someone releases a particularly horrible yet delicious sense of self-righteousness.

I want to rail at the woman for hurting my friend; for her arrogance and conceit. She committed a sin common to us all: assuming we know the whole a person when in truth we know nothing more than an experience or, worse, the rumor of an experience. The woman spoke the words “I know who you are” to say “I know the real you that you hide from these people.” She made the leap from hearing words spoken in hushed salacious tones to feeling she owned my friend’s truth and, thus, had the right to wield power over her.

We make the error of believing we know someone’s whole being once we have the most meager measure of information about them. Our natural inclination to fill in the gaps with assumptions and stereotypes lures us to say, “I know everything I need to know about that person,” once we’ve gained the smallest of facts (or gossip) about a person.

Could I go back in time to invisibly stand beside my friend in that moment and hold her hand, I would whisper to her the answer I would have her proffer. As the words dripped from the wretched woman’s lips, “I know who you are,” my friend would smile and say, “No. You know something I lived through, something I experienced, but you don’t know me.”

The knower of the secret believed she possessed the most important identifying story in my friend’s life and, therefore, possessed power over my friend. She gloated over the possession of an illusion. The truth she thought she knew of my friend was a false one, some variation of a story she heard in a community that decided to value salaciousness over accuracy or compassion. We humans generally prefer spilling the tea over extending the benefit of the doubt.

But what if the woman had the correct story? It changes nothing. Even when we know every painful and shameful detail of someone else’s moment, we know little of the person themself. I want to hope that people wouldn’t assume to know all of me based on a moment that exposed the worst of me. I would defy them to use their sliver of knowledge in any attempt to control me.

Whatever we may or may not know of a person, may we resist the temptation to believe that a fraction of knowledge represents the whole. And may we reject the temptation to assume knowledge of any negative sort grants us the right or duty to lord it over them or use it to control them.

I pray, too, that we know ourselves well enough not to abdicate our place as the leading expert on us to any other person. The version of my friend I know happens to be strong, wise, brilliant, and compassionate. She possesses many other virtues and vices, the vast majority of which I have no knowledge and the knowledge to which I have no right. I have the honor of walking with her in a transition season of her life and, through which, her self-knowledge only grows deeper.

“I know you who you are.”

No, you don’t. You know a part of me. You know a moment in time that I survived and left behind. You know a time in which I failed but I have risen again, stronger and wiser. You believed a whisper of a rumor of a person I attempted to or had to be, and nothing more.

No. I know me and now you never will.