I’ve always been a do it on my own type of girl because I got tired of doing all the work anyway.  I got tired of asking for help only to be told no, or that I had to wait for a better time when I was expected to jump for them.  In less dramatic fashion, there were only a handful of people who did the latter, but that absolutely traumatized me because I was around that behavior most (like at work).  My family chalked that behavior up to control and I would spiral finding ways to prove I wasn’t controlling, or that if I was controlling something it was the right thing to do.  I got tired of that game as well.  It’s EXHAUSTING playing ping-pong with personalities, mitigating how people perceive us.  I think the reason it lasted so long for me is because I started the behavior so young, I didn’t know any better.  Regardless, that fierce independence (which did have its benefits in some ways) wasn’t independence—it was fear, a defense mechanism and all that led to a lot of isolation.  I learned to do a lot, but I also never learned to connect with anyone. It doesn’t matter if we’re in proximity with someone or if we know each other by work, by name, by anything, that doesn’t mean we’re having the conversations we need to create connection.              

I watched a podcast from a woman who works on improving the mid-life period for other women.  She talks about things we don’t often speak of, not even with our friends and it was in that vein she expressed the need for community—but it needs to be the right community.  We can spend all the time in the world with people (like I described in my former work environment) and still be totally alone. We need community and we isolate ourselves for so many reasons in a ton of different ways. I learned the hard way that spending time with the wrong people just for the sake of spending time with people is a waste of time.  They won’t be there in the end and they certainly won’t help our evolution.  We aren’t connected just because we’re in the same room with each other.  That’s when we can be at our loneliest because we isolate when we don’t speak what’s on our minds, when we tailor what we need to say, when we say yes when we want to say no—or when we say  no and want to say yes–when we have to keep up a façade so people will like us—all of that is exhausting and not true community. 

When we find those spaces we can ask the questions we don’t normally ask or talk about the things we don’t talk about, that is when real connection comes.  We all have our own little brand of weirdness that recognizes that same bit of weirdness in others but we’ll never see it if we don’t show it.  If we don’t have those spaces we need to create those spaces.  I know it isn’t easy because I spent years creating a group I thought fulfilled those needs only to be put outside of it.  It made me want to isolate even more because that was yet another example of how trust breaks.  HOWEVER.  The universe comes in and offers an explanation or a reminder on these things: we DO need people.  No one needs a thousand friends but we truly do need that core group we can rely on, who embrace all we are, who understand our brand of weirdness with just a look.  It can be tempting to just do it all on our own and I’ve talked about going fast means going alone but going far means going together and that hit me again hearing this podcast.  I realized I still needed to find those people who wanted to go far WITH me—not those who wanted me to carry the load the entire trip and then went on their merry way while I caught my breath.  The truth is there are people willing to help out there, people who align with us.  We just got really crappy at connecting.  We’re fine with showing and speaking and playing a part but we still have issues revealing the parts of ourselves that make us who we are because we fear we can’t trust anyone.  We might get burned a few times in the process, that’s just part of life.  But when we learn to walk through, we’ll find the people ready to help us out of the fire.