You cannot know by looking at people what is going on with them. And you can’t tell whether someone is just being dramatic or if they’re telling the truth. You need prior knowledge.

Yesterday, for example, at a meeting of a group I belong to, one of our members, A, took a seat nearby. A usually sits on the opposite side of the room. Immediately, the friend who was sitting by me, B, who had been talking with me, got up and sat by the open back door. “Better?” I asked B, not taking offense at all, and B nodded.

Now, my friend C sat down on the other side of me, and it was just too much. I started to cough, and rummaged in my bag. Suddenly, C too got up and moved several seats away. I thanked him.

Prior knowledge: A douses himself in cologne every day, and B has asthma that’s even worse than mine, so B had to move. Heck, I start coughing when I sit near A, but this time he wasn’t quite close enough to set me off. But then C tipped me over the edge. He realized why. He said, before he moved, “Oh, I knew you wore a mask because of your asthma, but I didn’t realize you were sensitive to cologne. I put on too much this morning.”

I still had to use my inhaler twice, even after C moved.

I reflected later on that it is fortunate how sick I was in late February and early March, because up until then I think most of my friends assumed I was just being dramatic and germaphobic by masking all the time.

You can’t tell why someone has a mask on, is what I’m saying.

They might have asthma, like me, and be vulnerable. They might be actively infectious themself. They might believe that tiny little nanobots are circulating and trying to take over their minds. Or they might just be sensible. You can’t tell. Reasons are often invisible.

The other invisible thing going on yesterday had to do with Mother’s Day, a holiday I dislike. I ranted loudly a little before the meeting started about how much I dislike it, though I loved my mother and even though my adult child loves me. But even when my mother was alive, she didn’t much care about the holiday; it struck us both as like Secretary’s Day and Teacher Appreciation Day, the one and only time a year when someone unnoticed and unrewarded gets all the attention and can then go back to being ignored.

(The staff at the nursing home used to call my mother “Mary,” in a cooing voice, as if she was a child and not The Reverend Doctor Taylor who happened to have severe late-stage Parkinson’s.)

That history wasn’t why I ranted loudly about the day among my friends, though. (Two of them had already texted me “Happy Mother’s Day.”) I ranted because in that room there were quite a few people who have cut off contact with their mothers, who hate their mothers, who miss their dead mothers terribly. Mother’s Day makes them suffer. They hate it. And you can’t tell by looking at them.

People already think I’m just being dramatic. They have thought that all my life. What the heck, so I’ll be dramatic about Mother’s Day.

And so a couple of acquaintances who hate their mothers, or who are estranged from their own children, came over afterwards and muttered to me that they agreed with me.

I had done my community service for the day; I am the contrary one, the lightning rod who takes the strike for everyone else, because I am willing to be loud. Dramatic.