You are somebody else’s background character while experiencing yourself as the center of an entire universe.

You live at the centre of your own experience, and in most of the scenes you appear in, you are the person in the background who was briefly there. Everyone is in this position simultaneously, each one the lead in a story where everyone else has a walk-on part.

Holding both facts at once is steadying. It takes some of the weight out of embarrassment, since you are far less observed than you feel. And it argues for treating the background people well, because each of them is at the centre of something just as vivid as yours.