CONNECTION

Sharing and connection and how they are intertwined with each other has been on my mind a lot lately. Maybe it has to do with the last two books I read (this one and oh my god, this one deserves its own post and despite what the title says, it’s not just for perfectionists but really for women who feel the pressure to live up to any type of ideal, which is all of us), because a lot of the things I start to notice come from what I’m reading.

That we call the practice of making our work public “sharing” is delightful, because it has the double meaning of being shared, as in broadcasted, but also, it’s an offering or an invitation to connect. Putting parts of yourself out into the world for other people to see – whether it’s art or writing, or showing up for your people – is a way of sharing pieces of yourself for other people to connect with. And I’ll admit to spending a lot of my life afraid – which looked like not knowing how – to share, especially the hard, vulnerable things. A version of my people-pleasing self was afraid that if I shared the hard, difficult, or ugly things, that would cause everyone to run away or lead to utter disconnection.

One of the ideas that stuck with me from the first book mentioned is that most conflict is (or was) a bid for connection. When we make an attempt at connection with other humans that isn’t recognized (or recognized how we want it to be) or is pushed aside, the pain that causes is at the root of a lot of our conflicts with the people in our lives. The need for connection has to be met because we’re social animals, biologically wired to need each other. If our attempts at connection are frequently ignored or aren’t answered in the way we need them to be, a lot of us eventually stop asking, if we even learned how to ask in the first place. That being said, there are also times where it becomes clear that it’s impossible for the people in our lives to connect with us in a way that feels safe and whole, and in those situations, we may have to enact boundaries to continue to keep ourselves open to finding connection in places where we aren’t constantly shut down. Somewhere along the way, I received a message that pain – whether that’s grief, anger, annoyance, sadness, loneliness – isn’t supposed be shared, that putting my suffering out into the world would make everyone else run the other way. So I learned to keep my conflicts and hard feelings to myself so that no one could be harmed by them. It was a wonderful plan…until the person being harmed by never acknowledging my need for connection, to be seen, was me. 

And yet, I ALSO thought that sharing the good things, joy, pleasure, excitement, pride, would make people run away because they weren’t relatable or because self-celebration was a turn-off. That is the very definition of a smush, where it doesn’t matter what you do, it feels like there is no good choice. And in the absence of good choices, we often do nothing and feel stuck.

There’s a part in the perfectionist book that talks about how we have to learn to ask for and accept support. Holding on to the ideal that we can do it all alone or hold our feelings by ourselves is ultimately isolating and deprives us of the opportunity to connect with other humans. And in reading that section, it reminded me of a passage from one of the most beautiful essays in Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things (another deeply human book that will wreck you): 

If I believed in God, I’d see evidence of his existence in that: In your darkest hour you were held afloat by the human love that was given to you when you most needed it.

This is one of my true joys: finding three different women through three different books who are weaving together this tapestry about the importance of connection and how we can try but it is deeply painful to live without it. Each one has come to the conclusion that WE NEED EACH OTHER and that sharing our needs, our thoughts, our realest selves, as vulnerable as it may be, is how we connect to other humans.

All of this likely resonates so much for me because I’m an Enneagram 4, and of course I want to see the world through the lens of emotions, connection, and belonging. Depth of connection is my joy and my longing. Using my work to connect to that purpose is the only way I can see to move forward, by sharing words, photos, practices and the occasional tidbits of real life – but also looking for ways to share it. What if making photos or art is a way to physically show and appreciate how we connect to our people, our work, and the world around us, or even more important, our joy and pleasure? What if yoga is simply a practice of connecting to ourselves? What if writing is a way that we use words and language to communicate and connect with people who want to know we all feel similar things? What I want more of, for all of us, is to find the humans who are able to see and appreciate the ways that we reach out, the ways that we show up in the world as our truest and freest selves, and connect in those places.