Connection as a gift.

BY ALESHA SINKS

Alesha is a wife and a stay-at-home mommy to two lively boys, living in sunny South Florida. She loves cooking, reading, the beach, and long conversations with good friends. She writes essays and poetry to encourage herself and others to daily reset their perspective on truth.

So many of us, or maybe mostly me, spend our growing-up years (and if we're honest, our all-grown-up years) searching for our own space. A space to walk into, physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually and feel seen, understood and valued.

We enter into this world begging for connection, desperate to bond with our parents or caregivers. We enter into our families begging for this attachment with every fiber of our being.

We enter playgrounds, elementary schools, friendships, romantic relationships, and even parenthood, aching to be known, understood, and loved.

It's nature.

Nature's need for nurture.

And we all have it.

And as I watch myself grow and learn through the early years of adulthood, I've noticed that this need is still there, present in every facet of my life.

It's a need that drives me, and if I am not careful, will steer my beliefs, thought patterns, activities, values and even identity.

Human nature itself pulls me into this goal of finding people who think and act and feel and believe and live like me. My very humanity tricks me into thinking that similarity is the strongest and best, or perhaps even the only, place for connection.

And that is the lie I am learning to fight.

That is the falsehood that threatens to turn me exclusive and fearful, hateful, and elitist.

At my best, desire for connection fosters learning from and growing together with a wide assortment of people, those alike and unlike myself.

Connection with other humans can be a beautiful space to challenge each other with respect and humility, to share beliefs with passion and openness to disagreement, and to encourage each other with love and honor.

At my worst, the desire for connection twists itself into a fear of being alone and wrong that rushes me headlong into the arms of rigid and exclusive beliefs in order to find my identity, my place within a group.

When I choose to position myself as a part of a group, to the exclusion of others, I lose my ability to listen and learn, to empathize and change. Exclusivity and rigidity quickly poison me toward the thoughts, beliefs, passions, and eventually humanity of those belonging to any group that is not my own, because I believe the lie that my belonging is only as strong as my agreement. I believe the lie that in order for my connection to be safe, my ideas must stay secure, at the expense of anyone and anything else that says differently.

When I take my desperate need for connection into the world, seeking validation and similarity, I quickly feel the need to assimilate myself to others in order to find my place.

Before I have time to realize it, the pressure is being put on me from all sides to choose a group and adopt all of its beliefs and idiosyncrasies, absent from nuance.

Likely it is the election cycle and state of the world that we find ourselves in right now with anxiety surrounding health and changes to our social interactions building on top of the pressure to have all the answers and vote for exactly the right people who will make our nation a better place, but the demand alive in my head to sign my allegiance to a group, to a package of ideas and beliefs, is especially strong right now.

I feel a mandate to list my name under a leader, a movement, a political party of ideation, a dream, a set of beliefs, and to wrap my identity around that thing and all the details it entails. 

Perhaps you are feeling it too?

I believe that...

We must recognize and fight the lie that tells us connection is best when we are assimilated.

I choose to believe that individuality, that ideas based on the vast array of human thought and experience, is beautiful and can be the beginnings of deep and meaningful connection with my fellow mankind, rather than the source of contempt and division.

I won’t always be able to find connection with others, but I refuse to believe that I must align perfectly with someone’s set of core beliefs in order to experience meaningful connection. 

And how then, do I find connection with others if I not seeking primarily to find those I am most similar to?

When I flip this need for connection on its head and instead choose to approach connection with an attitude of generosity, I can free myself from the pressure to assimilate with a singular group and distance myself from all others.

When I choose to give my own connection, rather than withhold it until I feel safe and the same, I then find that my options and capacity for connection multiply exponentially.

When I see connection as something to give, rather than something to be gained, I am suddenly able to connect in more ways than I ever dreamed possible.

And in the light of these realizations, truths that I must fight every day to believe, connection has never been so beautiful or so terrifying. Because if my connection can be received with gratitude, it can be rejected with scorn.

Time and again, the experiences of my own life have proved that, whatever the pain of rejected and broken connection, the choice to be a connection giver rather than a connection consumer is worth the risk.

If you are lonely and isolated today, perhaps try to gift connection to someone else today, and see what that does for the weight on your soul.