Have you ever felt a profound sense of loneliness even as you’re surrounded by others? You pass an acquaintance in the aisle at the grocery store, or you smile as you open the door for a colleague at work, you stand awkwardly in the corner at a party…and you distinctly feel the sadness of being alone in a crowded room. Although you’re technically not alone, you don’t feel connection. Modern society leaves many of us feeling isolated when as humans we desperately need the opposite to thrive.
So closeness is something that every human craves, but what does it really mean? I found this question swirling through my mind this week as I found myself in India, a place known for its sheer number of inhabitants. My boyfriend warned me before I came that there is no such thing as privacy, and he wasn’t wrong. A level of intimacy you can’t imagine in the U.S. is a solid fact when you constantly have people pushing past you, against you. Every neighbor is in your business, every line becomes a disorganized crowd with no discernible queue, and there’s an absence of the concept of personal space.
That physical closeness doesn’t by itself guarantee belonging, but it made me think about how at home we insist on space constantly. And it’s something I certainly still value. A quiet moment can be golden. But living independently from our families, coming home to our little bubbles after work every day, and putting our headphones in wherever we are, so we don’t have to interact with others- that also has its own cost. And being in an environment where that bubble wasn’t the norm shook up my perspective and made me think about what closeness really means.
Another part of that was witnessing the dynamic of my boyfriend’s family, where closeness means constantly getting asked why you haven’t eaten more, being told daily to remember to take a jacket, and every decision being made with input from everyone, not simply on your own. It means a table full of food where everyone reaches over each other to dig in while all of you talk over each other and to each other. It means walking arm in arm down the street and little cheek kisses just because. It means teasing and insults and fake wrestling matches. It means ending each night sitting under the covers with five of us in one bed, talking softly until we’re tired enough to head off to our own beds. There was a level of closeness and connection and love there that moved me deeply.
For me, it was reminiscent of many moments in life that I’ve had with my own friends and family, but the difference, I think, is that there is a cultural pressure to be independent and there’s this idea in the west that it’s weak to lean on others that way. There’s no one way to live, and there are elements of both American and Indian culture that I love. But it was nice to have a reminder that we don’t *have to* do things solo all the time, that we should lean into time together with our families as much as we can. That sometimes isolation and loneliness are the creation of our own misconceptions about what we “should” do.
Ultimately, what I took away from meeting Aditya’s family is that the norm of American independence is great in many ways but lacking in others, and it’s nice to now have another home and another family to count myself a part of. And I felt lucky to be folded into it ❤️
Jill Came Tumbling After 