Our world feels starved of human connection - something people spend years chasing after, reshaping themselves for, and inevitably abandoning when it fails to meet their expectations. Yet what people are searching for is often not connection, but understanding: the desire of seeing their own sense of self reflected back through another person. The truth is, we have mistaken relationships with reflecting pools, where we seek confirmation, a mirror on who we already believe we are, instead of encounters with people who are fundamentally separate from us.
In my fifteen years, I have been a difficult child, careless friend, shameless liar and stubborn debater. In each version of myself I have sought to recognise who I was becoming in the eyes of others. Much of my conflict has not come from misunderstanding, but from a gap between who I wanted to be and who I was afraid of being seen as. This tension between identity and perception forms the way I understand human connection, and the various forms that it takes in our lives.
The first form of connection I could identify was founded on asymmetry; someone sets an expectation and you spend your time attempting to reach it but never quite mirroring. I could see it in my teachers, family members, and in everyday interactions like the clerks at baker's delight. Here, connection often meant performance. Under the pressures of authority people are meant to impress, to comply, and to evoke the version of themselves that is rewarded by those above them. The reflecting pools ripple once more; they request of us to not simply present ourselves but to validate the image of others, and reshape our expression in response to it.
The second kind of connection I began to realise was more subtle, it did not rely on a hierarchy but by a mutual support between two people. It grew strongest in team sports, long term friendship, and in camps far from home - where identity was not something performed but simply shared. Real friendship, I came to realise, does not rely on being perceived in a particular way. There is no need to impress, no fixed expectation to reach. Instead it felt like a willingness to exist alongside someone without the ache to reshape yourself in response to them. It is still possible that friendship is a kind of reflecting pool - but if it is, it is one that we look into together, without trying to control what the reflection should be.
But in contrast to the other types, there is familiarity. the space between two people who have had every opportunity to know each other, but have simply chosen not to. It sours when we force depth and it easily bends to its surroundings. Familiarity is the potential energy behind relationships, and not a bond of itself - I have seen it between desperate people, kind people, and cruel people. It knows no boundaries beyond its shallow depth. I find that familiarity is the byproduct of our embedded desire to look inwards through others: we use people as avatars to project versions of ourselves we are comfortable with, in an attempt to soothe the uncertainty of sonder.
Familiarity is the epitome of a reflecting pool, it is a double walled one way mirror, in which we observe ourselves, instead of others.
I cannot offer a final conclusion, just as I cannot offer myself a final identity. Human connection is an idea I will add and take away from as I get older, and I will continue to morph and contort myself to the environments I find myself in.
Perhaps, beyond all of its complexities, connection manages to remain warm, dishonest, and ordinary as we manage to be warm, dishonest, and ordinary. I hope that we will choose to simply be at peace with connection, to not observe it from a distance but to dwell inside of it, and let it ripple past us, like stones against a constant current. And perhaps we will try to withhold anger from where we find ourselves; where we are is, in part, the direct consequence of the love we have been shaped by.
