reverse nostalgia

Waiting by Edgar Degas

My friend decided we needed a collective revamp for our social and love lives. Half-way done with our degrees, we’ve settled into the soft, familiar grooves of routine. It’s been comforting, but stagnant. We need new energy, new people, a spring cleaning of our weary assumptions about love, about connection. So, she decided to host a blind date dinner—an informal gathering of friends and friends-of-friends on the week of Valentine’s day.

The preparations were endless— making seating arrangements, printing name cards, buying ribbons, collecting chairs from various houses, writing invitations. Really, it was all for us girls. To give ourselves something to be excited about. To make it feel like an occasion, like something more than just another evening in the steady rhythm of university life. We giggled over the matches we made for each other, whispering predictions, twirling in front of mirrors, secretly waiting for a flicker of something new to interrupt the sameness of our days.

But maybe the real loss we were mourning was not the repetition of places and faces, but the way you forget how to truly meet people. Beyond the quick, passing interactions. Beyond the surface.

I’ve been told countlessly, to be myself more. To speak up. To take up space. To be brighter, bubblier, more expansive. As if connection is measured in volume. But I don’t believe that. I think the quiet ones, the ones who linger at the edges of the table, are often the ones who hunger for it the most. Not for noise, but for something deeper. For the kind of recognition that doesn’t just skim across the mind but reaches down—way down—into that raw, aching place inside the soul.

I care not about the anatomy of your brain, but the anatomy of your heart. Do you ache where I do?

In the uncomfortable silences, my blood is a shaken bottle of champagne. I fizz with restlessness. Unable to stay contained in the narrow neck of politeness and small talk, I try to fill the void. I take the most intimate parts of my life my vulnerabilities, my struggles, and lay them out on the floor, clearly to see.

And what do I get in return? A tilted head. A half-smile. You’re weird, but in a good way.

Thanks, I guess.

As if my heart, beating openly on the floor, is just an unusual artifact in a museum of normalcy. I’ve laid down my armor, my shields of coldness and distance, my weapons of logic and rationality. It’s painful because you are asking—asking someone to meet you halfway, and being met with silence.

Forced connection is this mess of a hunger for intimacy, but a fear of vulnerability, of wanting to be yourself, but unconsciously trying to please others. And sometimes, without realizing it, your attention drifts away from the quiet truth of who you are and becomes stuck on whoever you are trying to convince. As if proving your existence to them is more important than living it.

You leak energy when you overshare. Privacy is power and protection. Maturity is keeping your personal life private without explaining yourself and telling people more than they need to know, because those who get you don’t need it, and those who don’t get you don’t deserve it. —@MindTendencies2

I guess this is the lesson I am learning every day— that I don’t need to do something, to prove myself, to show others that I am worthy. My worth doesn’t depend on the relation between me and other things. It is the relation within myself, a satisfaction, a wholeness within me. I don’t need to give up parts of myself when it doesn’t feel right. Sharing is effortless and soul-quenching when it comes from the right place. But when it doesn’t, it feels stripping, emptying, hollowing.

It’s like scooping parts of my heart out and laying it in a cup for others to enjoy. Only later do I realize that it’s all gone, and I have nothing left for me to savor. My hard work, the pulp of my being—just given to others who just wanted something sweet and cold in the midst of the blazing summer heat.

True connection goes beyond the verbal, the clumsy cartwheeling of words, the careful weaving of perceptions. No—it is something you feel. You can try again and again to reach into someone and try to make them feel what you did with stories, laughs, and looks. But that has never worked for me.

There is something more unexplainable, more intelligent, more primal that tethers people to us. Is it the shape of their shadow falling just so against yours? Is it the echo of a laugh you’ve never heard but always knew? Is it in the pauses where silence stretches but never feels empty? You meet their eyes, and in that instant, you are stripped bare—not in a way that leaves you vulnerable, but in a way that makes you feel more yourself than you have in the presence of anyone else. It’s like reverse nostalgia—a quiet, electric thrill of meeting someone new, wrapped in the undeniable feeling that, somehow, some part of you had always known they were coming.

I’ve realized connection is an act of faith. That with the right people, you don’t have to expose parts of yourself. The silence between you isn’t something to fill—it is something to rest in. You leave feeling replenished, not drained. Held, not scrutinized. Known, not just observed. It is the greatest gift we could wish for—to give so much of ourselves, our time, our attention, and what we receive is exponentially better—the gift of being seen, heard, and companioned exactly as our soul is.