QUESTION: Personal or universal?

My wife & I recently rewatched "You've Got Mail" which is one of my all time favourite movies.

Tom Hanks' character Joe Fox is the CEO of a book superstore on the Upper West Side and a big fan of the Godfather.  A theme that runs through the movie is the much quoted, "Its not personal, its business".

I've often wrestled with this idea of the personal vs universal.  Whether its a "principle" that someone is describing as a universal truth or a "one size fits all" approach to anything I feel like some part of me as a human is being ignored.  That I'm not quite being seen. Or I'm being lumped into a box.

Do you get this feeling?

At Forefront we're trying to ask better questions & I've written a little bit about my experiences as an artist trying to manage this tension between the personal & the universal over at the Guild Creatives blog & the question I ask is this:

Is it possible that the more personal we are, the more universal we are?