I think people charge people.
I don’t mean that romantically. I don’t even necessarily mean friendship in the conventional sense. I mean there is something about being around another human being that quite literally gives something back to you.
You can be having the worst day.
Your battery is at 3%. Everything feels heavier than it should. You’ve spent too much time inside your own head. Life has somehow become this very serious thing that needs to be solved.
And then somebody calls.
Or you call them.
And you talk.
That’s it.
Maybe you spend an hour talking about absolutely nothing. Maybe you talk about life. Maybe you gossip a little. Maybe you complain. Maybe you laugh at something that isn’t even that funny. Maybe you tell an old story you’ve both heard fifteen times.
And somehow, when the conversation ends, you’re different.
Nothing happened.
Nobody gave you money. Your problems did not disappear. The email you were avoiding is still sitting there. Tomorrow still has all of its responsibilities.
But somehow you have battery again.
I find that fascinating.
There have been countless times in my life when I have felt completely depleted, spoken to someone on some random afternoon, and walked away feeling like the world wasn’t nearly as bad as it looked an hour earlier.
Sometimes I wonder what exactly happens in those moments.
Maybe it is the laughter.
Maybe it is being seen.
Maybe it is getting outside your own head for a while.
Maybe it is hearing another person talk about their equally ridiculous life and remembering that everybody is carrying something.
Maybe it is simply the quiet reassurance that somebody, somewhere, knows you exist.
I don’t know.
But I know it works.
I think sometimes we underestimate how unnatural prolonged isolation can feel because we have become so good at surviving it.
We work alone. Eat alone. Commute alone. Scroll alone. Watch things alone. Think alone. Worry alone. Then we wonder why everything starts sounding so loud inside our heads.
And then you sit across from another person.
You look them in the eye.
You smile.
They smile.
You make a stupid joke.
They laugh.
You disagree about something meaningless. You tell them something that has been bothering you. They tell you what has been bothering them. Someone says something completely unserious and suddenly you are laughing harder than you have laughed all week.
And for a little while, being alive feels lighter.
There is something beautiful about how little it can take.
I think I thrive amongst people.
The whole lone-wolf thing has never really worked for me, and the older I get, the less interested I am in pretending that it should.
I need people.
I like needing people.
And maybe more importantly, I like the idea that somewhere in this very complicated web of human beings, somebody might need me too.
Not desperately. Not dysfunctionally.
Just humanly.
Maybe that is what community really is.
A million tiny exchanges of energy.
Today I have enough, so I give you some.
Tomorrow I am empty, so you sit with me for an hour and somehow give some back.
Sometimes I carry you. Sometimes you carry me. Most of the time neither of us even realizes that carrying is happening.
We just call it catching up.
I hope no experience ever makes me so guarded that I lose this part of myself.
I hope heartbreak never convinces me that isolation is safer.
I hope disappointment never makes me mistake distance for strength.
I want to keep existing amongst people.
I want to look people dead in the eye. I want to smile like my life depends on it. I want to make tiny jokes. I want to have conversations about things that do not matter and conversations about things that matter enormously.
I want to laugh, frown, argue, listen, embarrass myself, become shy, become loud, sit quietly, tell stories, hear stories.
I want to participate.
Because perhaps we were never supposed to generate all the energy required to be alive entirely by ourselves.
Maybe that is why one conversation can change an afternoon.
Maybe that is why seeing an old friend can make a terrible week feel survivable.
Maybe that is why, every now and then, another person walks into your depleted little world and, without even knowing it, plugs you back into life.
People charge people.
And I think that is really cute.