Last year, four of us hiked to a mountain shelter tucked between limestone cliffs and old-growth forest. Five hours up. Same trail, same weather, same day. Four completely different climbs.

One guy was inexperienced. He'd packed too much and wasn't fit enough for what he was carrying. An hour in, it was obvious he wasn't going to make it at that pace. So I swapped backpacks with him, took his heavy one, gave him mine. We made it to the top. But his climb was survival. Every step was a negotiation with his body.

Another guy, ex-military, in his fifties, had done this route a dozen times. It wasn't easy for him physically anymore, but he enjoyed it. He knew the terrain, knew the rhythm, knew what was coming. His climb was familiar and earned.

The fourth guy spent most of the climb setting up cameras and flying his drone. He wasn't really there for the mountain. He was there for the footage. His climb was a production.

I was having a blast. Cracking jokes the whole way up, enjoying the scenery, not thinking about the distance.

If someone asked us afterwards how the climb was, every answer would be different. And every answer would be true.

Same five hours, same trail, same weather. One climb was a fight, one was a ritual, one was a shoot, and one was a walk with a view.

That's how truth works. Not just on mountains. Everywhere. Two people go through the same meeting, the same breakup, the same year, and walk away with completely different versions of what happened. Neither is lying. Both are telling the truth as they lived it.

The problem starts when one of them decides their version is the only real one.

"It wasn't that bad." "You're overreacting." "I don't see the problem." These aren't observations. They're one person imposing their climb on someone else's legs.

Here's the mechanism I didn't see for a long time. You don't just experience events. You harden a story around them. And once the story sets, it stops feeling like an interpretation and starts feeling like what happened. Losing a job becomes failure or opportunity. Silence becomes rejection or peace. A difficult year becomes proof that life is unfair or proof that you can handle more than you thought. The event didn't decide. You did. But the deciding happened so fast it felt automatic.

That's why arguments about shared experiences are so vicious. You're not defending facts. You're defending the story you built to make sense of them. Questioning someone's version feels like questioning their reality. Because to them, it is their reality.

The uncomfortable part isn't that meaning is subjective. Most people will nod along with that. The uncomfortable part is what it implies about your own stories. If meaning is something you assigned, then the version you've been carrying isn't the truth. It's your truth. And you chose it, even if the choosing didn't feel like a choice.

That doesn't make your experience less real. It makes it less final.

The story you've been telling yourself about what happened to you, the one that explains why you're stuck or angry or still waiting, can be questioned. Not because it's wrong. Because it's one version.

The move I use now is simple enough to feel almost too small. When I catch myself in an argument about what happened, or replaying an event and getting angry again, I ask: "What's my climb here?" Meaning, what am I carrying into this that's shaping how I see it? Tiredness, old resentment, a story I decided on years ago? The event is the trail. My experience of it depends on what I brought.

It doesn't resolve the argument. But it usually reveals that I'm not fighting about the thing I think I'm fighting about.