Something has been bothering me recently. I used to be much more willing to tell the people in my life about whatever crazy thing was happening. Brandi in her thirties would happily share whatever she was in the middle of, partly to create a moment of connection, and partly because those conversations usually went somewhere very interesting. I’ve been missing that lately. There is so much more of my life to share now, and yet somehow I’ve become more careful about sharing it.
Some of that makes sense; there are other people in my stories now, and my personal and professional lives overlap in ways they didn’t before. But I hadn’t noticed how often I was editing myself until I started wondering why I could want to connect with someone and still put off making the call. I’m still so curious about the lives of the people I know and have things I’d like to share about mine, but sometimes I wait until I have the energy for the conversation I actually want to have and then we all know what happens next…
The other night, after the kids went to bed, I was still thinking about work. It had been a frustrating couple of weeks, and I was having trouble leaving it alone. I turned on a podcast about black holes and got interested in the swirling matter, heating up and becoming luminous as it moved toward a place from which light couldn’t escape.
Somewhere in there, black holes became a metaphor for life. I began thinking about my own spiral, and how I could give a fear more and more attention until it started pulling everything else into it. Could I move in the other direction, shine brighter, and expand outward even while I felt that pull? Obviously, I was doing my own thing with the physics of black holes by then.
I started imagining that I was my own little universe, with this one thing occupying me and so much else happening at the same time, including all the people I wanted to be close to. Then I thought about the person in front of me as another whole universe, full of light, possibly trying to outshine a black hole I know nothing about. What happens when we’re actually present with each other? Am I there enough to find out, or am I figuring out pickup? We could both have so much we’d like to say and never get much further than how busy we’ve been.
But sometimes we do, and a conversation gets interesting, and then I stop thinking about my next answer or question. I find myself sharing something I hadn’t planned to, and we discover a little common ground, or a completely different way of looking at it. We keep going, and suddenly I have all these things I want to ask. That was what I kept trying to picture: the two of us, with entire universes happening inside us, somehow drawing more light out of each other.
And then a funny coincidence happened. Spotify recommended an audiobook called Vibe by Adam Grant. I started listening, and my first takeaway was a fairly forgiving thought: between technology and Covid, it’s no wonder I’ve lost some of my ease with connection; I’m out of practice. I’d been comparing myself to a younger version of me without giving much consideration to everything that has changed about how everyone spends time together.
I can know what you had for dinner, where you went on vacation, and how tall your children have gotten without knowing much about how you actually are. And you can know all those things about me. There’s something lovely about getting those glimpses, especially when we don’t see each other often. But it can also feel as though we’ve caught up when we haven’t really connected.
I wonder how many of us are in some version of this, happy to hear from someone while quietly feeling overdue to reach out ourselves. I’d been waiting to feel a little more like the person who could so easily start a conversation. Now I’m wondering whether I’ve had that backward, whether having the conversation is how I find her again.
