A personal experience can be real without explaining every other person’s experience.

What you lived through is evidence, and it is evidence of one case. The temptation is to generalize from it, because it was vivid and because it cost you something, and then the account becomes a rule about how things work for everybody. Others who went through the same thing differently end up having to argue with your certainty.

Tell your story as yours: this is what happened to me and what it was like. Add what you do not know about other people’s versions, and ask about theirs rather than assuming it matched.