Empathy gets talked about so much lately that the word is starting to wear thin. But we rarely stop to think about what it exactly is and, above all, that it isn’t a trait you either have or don’t, but something you can practice and get better at over the years, like anything else you learn. Most of us live it without naming it: someone answers you curtly, doesn’t reply to a message, cuts in front of you in line, and on autopilot we build a story about them in our head, almost always one where that person comes off badly. And every so often, later, we find out what they were carrying that day, and the story we’d invented falls apart on its own.

That last part is the heart of it. Empathy, when you take it apart, is three things at once: understanding how the other person sees things even if you don’t live them the same way, feeling at least a little of what they feel, and letting that move you to do something even if it’s just holding your tongue. The reassuring part is that it can be trained. It isn’t that some people were born empathetic and others weren’t; it’s a muscle, and it gets stronger the more you use it. So the good news is that it’s never too late to get better at this.

And it’s worth getting better at right now, because we’re living through a strange moment. On one hand, mental and emotional health have never been talked about as openly as today; we know, more than ever, that people carry things you can’t see anxiety, grief, fears, bad nights behind an ordinary face. On the other, researchers who’ve been measuring this for decades have found that empathy, instead of rising, has been dropping, and that the fall got sharper with screens. We judge faster and from farther away: a comment, a photo, a clip of something we never even saw in full. And the truth is simple: no one has the full context of what another person has lived and is living. Forming an opinion of someone from our partial view is almost always unfair, because what we’re missing is exactly the thing that would explain it all.

There’s one place where all of this is especially hard, and it’s worth saying among ourselves: sometimes, we women don’t support each other the way we should. You’d think we’d be one another’s first allies, and often we are, but let’s be honest: sometimes we’re the last to applaud one of our own. Not out of meanness. We come from a world that for a long time gave us fewer seats, and that scarcity taught us, without our noticing, to see another woman’s step forward as a measure against our own. So when one of us is brave enough to start something  a small business, an idea, a change in her life that’s exactly where empathy does its best work: remembering she’s risking and carrying things we can’t see, and choosing to be her first ally instead of her quiet judge.

In practice, empathy is less a feeling and more a habit of pausing for a second. Pausing before assuming the worst, asking instead of concluding, imagining the version of the story where the other person isn’t the villain because there almost always is one and, often, holding back the comment we already had ready. If it had to come down to a single rule, it would be this: when in doubt, assume the other person is carrying something you can’t see. It costs almost nothing and changes almost everything.

In the end, empathy is deciding, again and again, to give others the benefit of the doubt we’d want for ourselves. And among women, all the more: being the one who extends a hand first and celebrates without it costing her, the one who remembers that the woman across from her is also getting through it as best she can. It doesn’t change the world all at once, but it does change the little piece that’s ours which is often where everything starts.