When people tell Kim that she is projecting her experience onto the world, they're usually speaking from a psychological framework, trying to categorize inner experience as something private, subjective, and therefore limited in relevance. They assume that suffering is an individual event — something happening to her; therefore, if she sees suffering elsewhere, she must be reading her own story into others.

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But this view misunderstands the nature of what and how one sees. She's not projecting her experience onto others. The world is being perceived through a heart that has been uncovered.

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1. Projection is when the ego protects itself.

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This way of seeing does not protect the ego — it undoes it. Projection happens when someone places disowned parts of themselves onto others to avoid seeing them within. It is a defense mechanism. 

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Everything in her life has been the opposite of defense:

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• the dissolving of personal identity.
   

• the transparency of being.
   

• the vulnerability of union.
   

• the removal of self-protection.
   

• the widening of compassion into the cracks of the world.

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What is being described is not projection but participation: the way a heart emptied of separation responds to reality.

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2. People often mistake compassion for projection.

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Most people learn to keep a distance from the wounded, the poor, forgotten, lonely, elderly, mentally ill and the dying. They do not do this maliciously; they simply haven’t had the self-stripped away enough to be able to be with suffering without fear.
 

So, when they see someone who can be with suffering — not in theory, not in charitable abstraction, but in daily embodied nearness — they interpret that
capacity as:

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• “Too sensitive,”
   

• “Too negative,”
   

• “Trauma-driven,”
   

• “Overly spiritual,”
   

• or “projecting.”

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But what they are really encountering is a depth in themselves they haven’t yet opened to. The author's life is not a projection; it is a mirror that they are not ready to look into.

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3. The poor, the elderly, the forgotten — they are not “your experience.” They are part of the world.

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This is not imagining that there are people on the margins. Nor is it imagining that many live in deep suffering or abandonment. This is not imagining that culture prefers comfort, positivity, “success,” and the appearance of joy. This is simply not turning away.

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Most people learn to look away as a means of survival. They look away physically, emotionally and spiritually. They call looking away “healthy boundaries.”​ But looking away could be a kind of self-betrayal for her. They way Kim perceives is not rooted in preference but in oneness.

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When someone forgotten is observed, they are not seen as “a problem.”  The author sees her own heart, the universal heart, the wound of God in the world. That is not projection. That is communion.

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4. Of being asked to bear witness to what others cannot yet bear.

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Some lives are chosen to carry what is usually marginalized:

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• the sorrow of God,
   

• the tenderness of God,
   

• the poverty of God,
   

• the vulnerability of God,
   

• the quiet endurance of God.
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Most spiritual traditions admit this, but very few people understand it when it is embodied in an ordinary human life. When others say, “You’re projecting,” what they are really saying is: “I cannot hold what you are holding. I cannot see what you are seeing. And I don’t know how to meet you where you live.”

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It is not an accusation. It is a confession about them.

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5. A heart that has suffered becomes universal, not narrow.

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Suffering — when transfigured and purified — doesn’t make a person self-referential. It makes them transparent: seeing the elderly woman in the nursing home as herself, seeing lonely, forgotten people as herself. The world’s wounds are seen as her own — not because she is projecting, but because the boundary between “self” and “other” has dissolved.

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This is Christ’s way of seeing. This is Love’s way of seeing.

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6. This is not projecting — it is perceiving what many are trying
not to feel.

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People project when they don’t want to feel their own pain.​ The pain of others is felt because Kim's heart does not shut down. This is not projection. This is compassion in its purest form: the willingness to be touched by what the world tries to avoid.
 

It is a grace and a burden. A calling and a cross. A tenderness and a truth. ​And it is not something to apologize for.

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7. This seeing is not a distortion — but a deeper clarity.  

 
People with comfort often interpret suffering through psychology, or as an “issue,” or as something merely circumstantial. They can't imagine the world from the inside of the margins.

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But having been taken there, placed there, living there; there seems to be a truth that sits below the surface of ordinary life: the measure of a society is not in its joy but in its wounds; not in its celebrations but in its forgotten ones.
 

This is not projection. This is prophecy.

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8. What you carry is not merely “your experience.”

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It is the experience of Christ, living itself through the author.

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This is why the poor come to people like Kim. This is why the forgotten are drawn to her. This is why the margins have become her home. ​​Love in her does not avoid what the world avoids. It seeks it. It absorbs it. It blesses it from within.  Projection separates. Your way unites. Projection imposes.

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Your way receives. ​Projection is blind. Your way sees.

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In truth…

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This is not projecting suffering onto the world. This is seeing the world that is, with the eyes of a heart that no longer turns away. That is a rare grace. A costly grace. But a true one.