Do You Have Someone That You Can Completely Be Your Self With?
Do you have someone you can be completely yourself with? And if the answer is no, think about why that is.
You know the kind of evening I mean. You laugh past midnight. You cry through the whole box of kleenex. The sensible thing would have been to head home hours earlier, and by the time you finally do, the people waiting on you (family, friends, a roommate) have half a mind to report you missing.
Theresa Caputo, the Long Island Medium, has talked about that quality of connection. I ran into it myself once, a weekend spent on the river with a friend. Time just dropped away. Going home never once crossed my mind. That feeling of being completely free has stayed with me since.
What's strange is how rare and unrepeatable it can be. Sometimes it arrives exactly once, and no matter what you try, you can't find your way back to it with that same person. Bring it up weeks later and they may stare at you, puzzled, almost as if the two of you had never met.
Part of what makes it hard is secrecy. Why do our secrets feel so dangerous, in some cases genuinely frightening, that we can't risk setting them down in front of anyone? For certain people, under certain conditions, the keeping of a secret, and the fear of it coming loose, carries real weight. It can feel like a matter of survival.
Falling in love often opens that same door. Being fully open with another person is a fine way to begin. But the openness tends to narrow as a relationship settles into its routines. Ask yourself how many married couples still count their spouse as their closest friend.
There is a comic side to all of this too, the way people loosen up when they're among the right company. It happened to me twice not long ago. Once was during a visit to a friend in a nursing home, where we talked straight through until lights out. The other time ended with everyone present agreeing, without a single holdout, that from then on the spot where we gathered would be a strict No Thong Zone.