#vulnerability

There are periods in life when walls are exactly what we need.

After instability, heartbreak, family conflict, financial dependence, burnout, or simply too many years spent arranging ourselves around other people, independence can feel almost intoxicating. You begin making decisions without negotiation. Your evenings belong to you. Your money, routines, ambitions, hobbies, and private thoughts stop being subject to somebody else's weather.

For the first time, perhaps, life feels genuinely yours.

There is nothing inherently unhealthy about this. Sometimes withdrawal is not avoidance but recovery. A period of intense self-reliance can give a person room to discover preferences that had been buried beneath obligation. It can restore confidence. It can teach the surprisingly important lesson that solitude and loneliness are not the same thing.

A wall can protect a garden while the roots are still taking hold.

But there is a difficult question hidden inside successful independence:

How do you know when the wall has finished doing its job?

When self-sufficiency becomes extremely rewarding

The trouble with independence is that, when it works, it works very well.

You learn that you can solve your own problems. You stop worrying so much about whether somebody will stay. You develop routines you enjoy and ambitions that require no one's permission. The emotional volatility of depending heavily on another person may begin to seem less romantic than it once did.

For the general election in the U.S. today, on 3 November 2020, I volunteered as a canvasser, someone who knocks on doors to encourage registered voters to cast their ballots. However, something unrelated happened that is significant enough for me to need to write it down before I forget the details. It's that I had the biggest crush in a single day that I have ever had in my life with the person who was my canvassing partner. It felt almost like we had a shared mind or something, that is the best way to put it, like our thoughts functioned in the same way. This was the only time I’ve asked a girl out face to face, although she politely said no, and since I only know her first name, it is fairly doubtful I would see her again. I do not know how different her perceptions might be of that time, but I think those two and a half hours or so that we spent together having fun and talking will be permanently engrained in my brain. The toughest part for me is wondering if I will ever experience something like that again, because I don’t have anything really to compare it with. I feel like I fell in love at first sight, one of the few times I have ever felt so strongly about another person.

I am not going to be able to sum up this person succinctly with the amount of time I have available, so let me instead just share a list of why I liked her so much. She had a beautiful voice that sounded like she was singing each time she spoke. She had an inimitable fashion sense, entirely her own. Namely, she wore a blue suede baseball cap, a khaki trench coat, a yellow scarf, light blue jeans, and pink sneakers. She carried herself with a gentle dignity, and had a slightly formal way of speaking, kind of like me, and a cute laugh. It was less anything physical that struck me about her, though. Instead, it was a feeling of completeness being around her. I felt an instant connection to her, like she knew what I was thinking, and how I thought, right away. I liked the calming sense of her presence, and there were so many things I wanted to ask her but wasn't sure if it was the right time to do it. We talked for about half the time while walking around to the different sites, and I kept on wanting to make her laugh, and succeeded more times than I was expecting. These words don't capture the feelings at the time, though. I liked all her little quirks, like the way she pronounced "Guthrie" as "GOO three" or "cordoned" as "core DONNED." Why is it that in retrospect, it feels so silly? The truth is there was something different in me being with her, a positivity that lies dormant in me too often. I had a sense that her mind functioned similarly to mine, some type of eccentricity that is hard to sum up in general terms, but more comes from examples, like the way she talked about her enjoyment of maps of navigation, and the way she noticed small details on the houses we were passing. Most people don't notice these things, and being able to share them with another person was rare and special for me.