We Need People

I am of the opinion that life’s smallest moments are often life’s most profound. It’s in these seemingly simple intonations that the best sort of change occurs.

I recently cried at a wedding.

Lest you be fooled into thinking this is unusual and possibly profound, it is not; I often cry at weddings. Deep expressions of familial love, well-executed personal details and concentrated statements of beauty and commitment overwhelm me, usually to the point of tears.

In the hopes of being honest and transparent, I did cry for all of those reasons at this wedding; many tears were shed. But the brightest moment among a night saturated with light didn’t have to do with the wedding at all. It revolved around a gin and tonic.

After the vows had been spoken, the wedding evolved into a massive celebration, so naturally my friends and I took to the bar. The first to order, I opted for the classic g&t. I’m not saying the friends who ordered after me copied me, but suspiciously enough, they ordered g&t’s too. I’ll let you decide for yourself the real story here.

I stepped back from the bar to make room for the other thirsty attendees. As my friend Alex Tedrow (fondly called Teddy by friends and strangers alike) came to find me, one deciding factor differentiated her drink from mine: a straw.

Now a straw might not normally constitute as a night-altering object, but to an enthusiastic story-teller, dancer and all-around mover and shaker, the presence of a straw contains the ability to save not only your own outfit, but many outfits around you.

Somewhere, there were straws just waiting for me to find them. Now I should tell you right now that when a challenge large or small looks me in the face, it’s not often that I wait around long enough to stare back. This particular instance lasted about a split second, but was enough to lay the foundation for something significant, significant to me at least.

“Do you want a straw? I get you a straw,” Teddy avowed in her charmingly-optimistic tonality, which often forgets auxiliary verbs. And with a smile and bounce in her step, she marched up to the bar to make good on her promise. Her approach, recognition and decision to act all happened more quickly than the internet disseminated the (glorious) news that Gilmore Girls will be given a second life.

Stunned. I was stunned. Her intuition and impetuousness catapulted me (a regular Speedy Gonzalez) into forced stillness. All I could do was stand and wait while she paid heed to my peculiar need.

And without explanation, her return cued my aforementioned tears. And then the semi-successful attempt to hold them back.

If you’re wondering why exactly the arrival of a small piece of plastic evoked tears, you would not be alone. Even upon reflection, I don’t have the clearest answer for myself. What I do know is that I had spent an epoch as the energizer bunny, without realizing just how desperate I was for an interruption.

They will tell you that post-grad life (and moving to a new city in particular) is filled with discouraging moments. While I have had the occasional spilled milk (or spilled rice) moments, I haven’t felt discouraged in any sort of earth-shattering, public meltdown sort of way. Chin up, eyes alert, I’ve used copious amounts of energy on survival, which has taken the form of pursuing a constant state of adventure. I haven’t allowed myself to reflect, or to need.

But this wasn’t always a struggle. Friends with firmer foundations, friends in Auburn, Austin, Atlanta, Birmingham, Chicago, Houston and St. Louis can certainly attest to my neediness. And yet somewhere along the way I’ve subconsciously encouraged my recent friendships to act as supplements rather than sustenance. That’s not to say these friends haven’t seen my flaws - they surely have (bless). But I haven’t actively humbled myself in these friendships. I’ve believed my own strange standard that to make it in this big old city, I can’t let them see me cry (so to speak).

But like it or not, we need people. We need them in a messy, mixture of mascara and snot running down your face, way. Of this, I am sure. And though it took a small yet graceful (friend and) gesture for me to remember, I’m ready to be a human again, and not something powered by a battery.

[Photo by Juliette Kibodeaux.]

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Featured

Why did you move?

A cardstock print sits propped against the lamp on my desk: a taupe watercolor swipe outlining a peakside Saguaro, the sun a tiny ring above. Beneath this minimalist illustration are these words in typeface: “I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”

I happened upon this notecard-sized print on the way out of a shop last weekend, after already having completed another purchase. It was the last print of its kind in the pile. I had to have it. I returned to the cashier: “This one, too.”

You see, this verse has been a thread weaving through my story, simple words spoken by a prophet long dead, a passage of comfort I’ve returned to again and again since my pilgrimage to the desert four years ago, when I inked a cactus on my wrist.

The Good Old Days

Last week was National Margarita Day.

I did not, however, celebrate the holiday. Truthfully, I’ve yet to find THE Mexican place here in Phoenix. You know the one: gaudy decorations, cheap food, even cheaper margaritas.

But there’s a Mexican restaurant at the corner of Charlotte and Whitebridge in Nashville, TN.

You may have heard of it.

10 Life Lessons This Cross-Country Move is Attempting to Teach Me

There are a few lessons life has attempted to teach me since my move — all things that I haven’t yet spiced up into a full essay, but deserve to be memorialized by my metaphorical pen nonetheless.

So I present a collection of lessons I’ve learned — and am still learning — in the last 3 months.

When The Hardest Thing & The Right Thing Are the Same

“Nuh uh!” I had protested.

The best thing about being 15 years old is that you know absolutely everything there is to know about life.

I certainly did.

I was arguing with my friends over the line in a song from The Fray (#tbt to moody middle school days): “Sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing are the same.”

Doing the right thing should never be hard, I confidently claimed. Anytime you have the choice to do the right thing, the healthy thing, the thing that builds up rather than tears down, it should never, ever be difficult to choose that.

Like I said, I knew everything.

Of course, 13 years later, I know that I don’t actually know much at all. And I also know that the hardest thing and the right thing are just about ALWAYS the same. It’s madness, really.

A Holy Yes to the Real Things: On Setting Social Media Boundaries

Two and a half hours.

That’s how long I had spent on my phone that day. Reading emails, sure. Responding to texts, some. Catching up on news, a bit. But mostly: scrolling through Instagram.

I had spent an hour of my day clicking through clips of someone else’s life. The sad truth? Some days, I’ve spent way more than just one hour lost to Instagram.

This is where the High School Musical cast flash mobs my brain with “we’re all in this together”—because my educated guess is that you can relate to this daily scroll-fest, too.

Who You Are Now: On Outgrowing Earlier Versions of Yourself

In the last few months, I’ve realized, much to my dismay, that I look older. That I am aging. This sounds dramatic coming from an able-bodied twenty-seven-year old, but it’s true. I didn’t know I found so much worth and security in the way that I looked until I started to notice a difference.

As humans, we note the passing of time in the changes around us. The tree that was once green is now orange, now yellow, now brown and bare. The crack on the stoop starts to grow weeds and crumble. The basil plant gets bigger, the dust on the shelf gets thicker, and the water stain on the ceiling expands to look like a dinosaur. We note these changes with surprise, as if they’ve happened all of a sudden instead of one day at a time.

On Navigating Grief During the Isolation of Quarantine

I read about the third suicide that had happened while we were in quarantine via email from my supervisor.

“I apologize for my absence. As some of you may have heard, my brother committed suicide over the weekend, and my family and I have been grieving this loss.”

I wrote back to the mass email individually saying how sorry I was for her loss, and that I, too, had suffered a loss at this time. Within the last month, I had lost my uncle to a surgery that left him paralyzed for weeks in the hospital. Alone. Without family. And that that had filled my heart with grief in a confusing time that didn’t allow people to gather and grieve the loss of a loved one. Let alone, let them say goodbye.

No Man Is An Island: An Ode to Our Neediness

The last few years of my life—so basically my Full Grown Adult Years—have been a reinforced lesson in this one simple yet slightly-jarring fact: we need each other. I mean, need-NEED each other.

“No man is an island,” says Thomas Merton, and my bae C.S. Lewis backs this up further by writing, “We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.”

We’re meant to be needy, but why is it so hard to acknowledge and accept this?

Say What You Need

Now maybe it wasn’t your family or your upbringing that made you neglect voicing your needs. Maybe it was a toxic relationship or a difficult work environment. Maybe it was someone who told you that your needs were selfish or that the desires of your heart didn’t matter.

Whatever it was, I urge you to identify those people or experiences or situations and start using that knowledge to change.

A Beginner's Guide to the Enneagram

Maybe you, like me, have become curious about the Enneagram because it is popping up everywhere in conversations and on your social media timeline. Maybe you know everything there is to know and have become quite fluent in Ennea-lingo (you even know that there are sub-types!).

Maybe this is the first time you’re ever hearing about this weird test and you’ve spent the last four paragraphs trying to figure out how to even pronounce the word “Enneagram” (In-ee-a-gram, for the record).

No matter where you’re at, we can all use some guidelines when it comes to personality tests, because none of us are immune to over-identifying, self-shaming, and becoming a walking personality-test-fulfilling prophesy. So, without further ado, here are my dos and don’ts of Enneagram-ing.

The Battle to Overcome Your Rejection

Rejection is an issue I’ve had to wrestle hard with over the last three years. Every time Rejection and I had to face off in the boxing arena, I would always end up slammed and pinned down. In boxing, you have ten seconds to get yourself up before the game is over. For me, it took months before I could even peel my head off the floor.

How to Respond to Someone Else's Grief

But this post isn't about my own grief. It's not about the tears I've cried, or the questions I've asked. It’s not about my own days where getting out of bed felt too hard.

It's about a different side of the fight. It's about your mom's grief when she loses her college roommate. And your best friend after she has a miscarriage. It’s about all the people you encounter, telling you about their grief.

Life, RelationshipsLaurel DicusOctober 22, 2015Featured, ArchiveComment

We Need People

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