I made a mistake and engaged with a stranger on the internet. It’s one of my main rules and I was mad at myself for breaking it.

Things lately have made it harder and harder to stay silent.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not silent when I’m in my own space, but I usually refrain from going on to other people’s pages and stirring the pot.

However, one of my friends had made an astute point about some recent goings ons, and I couldn’t help myself, I jumped on her bandwagon.

Following my comment, a complete stranger noted that I was speaking like someone who had never endured a hardship. This person clearly didn’t know the first thing about me, and honestly, my first reaction to his comment was to literally laugh out loud.

If you’ve been reading here long enough, I think just about anyone would agree that I’ve seen my share of stuff. Continuing the conversation with someone like that was clearly going to be a waste of my time, and I did not waste more time on it.

However, that comment has been simmering away in my subconscious since I read it. In the first place, I didn’t see how suffering a hardship had anything to do with the conversation at hand, other than to try to paint me as some sort of soft liberal. But beyond that, two things keep running around in my brain.

First of all, what hardship is for another person is entirely based on that person. As the saying goes, “I cried because I had no shoes, until I met a man that had no feet.”

Losing Steve, my partner, the love of my life, the person who had my back through thick and thin, was and is, and will always be, a terrible thing.

But then I think about my kids, who not only lost their wonderful father, but who also lost the person that their mother had been before.

Then, I think about children who have lost both parents, or, I think about children who have living parents who have been lost to them through something like addiction.

No matter what your hardship is, sadly, it is always possible to find someone who has it worse than you do. But, things don’t always have to be some tragedy on a grand scale for someone to experience a hardship.

Recently, I had a long conversation with a woman who has had some things going on.

Individually, and to an outside observer, they didn’t seem like that big of a deal, but happening all at the same time, well, it hit her pretty hard. As she was explaining her situation, she kept minimizing things, calling herself silly, and repeatedly saying things weren’t a big deal.

But they were, and I could tell that they weren’t silly. They were causing a lot of disruption and grief for her.

A few days later, I reached out to see if things had eased up, and she again apologized for “burdening” me, telling me she felt badly piling on, “after everything I’d been through.”

That’s the thing, though, it’s not a competition. When you get to the end of your life, no one gives you a big trophy because “you had to deal with the hardest stuff.” This idea that someone matters less, or someone can’t have an opinion because they haven’t “suffered enough” is utterly ludicrous.

Which brings me to my final thought on the matter. I have gone through some really awful stuff. I don’t want anyone else to have to go through things that I have, or if they do have to go through them, I want them to have better tools and more help than I had. And, truly, I feel like I’ve had a lot of help and a lot of great tools.

Maybe all of this makes me come across as soft, or someone who is too idealistic, but just think about how much better this world would be if we all chipped in to make other people’s lives just a little bit easier. Or, at least, we didn’t try to make them harder.

I suppose all of this may make me seem like a naïve snowflake. So be it. It’s not the worst thing I’ve ever been called. Once again, I go back to my favorite poem, “Desiderata.”

Even the dull and ignorant have their story.

An ignorant, thoughtless comment by a stranger reminded me of the person that I want to be. It reminded me to not be hardened by the hardships, whatever they may be, and to try harder to extend grace to those going through things that I cannot comprehend.

Liz Pinkey’s column appears on Saturdays in the Times News