On Being Familiar

 I tend to establish familiarity with people and places that I like. The restaurants I go to extend that familiarity back by letting me stay past closing time sometimes and even screen the occasional date for me, and bartenders at my favorite bar would often take shots with me or make it a point to clink glasses at least once in their shifts—almost like I exist outside the realms of protocols. The people that I like extend that familiarity back by letting me into areas of their lives where I don't often play a part, just to witness.

I've often gotten comments about how I know a lot of people. I do, and I don't. I know versions of me around people, and there's only one version of me that I like, the soft version.

I think there's a particular kind of intimacy in being allowed to exist beyond the purpose for which you were initially introduced. To no longer be just a customer who comes in to eat, a colleague who comes in to work, or a friend who occupies a particular, established role. To be allowed to linger, to witness, to be there without necessarily having to justify why you're there. I think that's what familiarity means to me. Not just being recognized, but eventually being permitted to exist outside the expectations attached to me.

I think that's why these little exceptions matter so much. They are evidence that my presence has become meaningful to someone or something beyond my own desire to be there. I can return to a place a hundred times, but I cannot unilaterally make it feel like mine. I can care deeply about a person, but I cannot decide that they will make room for me in their life. That part requires a response. I have to be let in.

And perhaps that is what I look for in people, too. Not necessarily someone who knows every version of me, but someone with whom the version I love most can exist without having to ask permission. Because I think there's a difference between being known and feeling known, between being liked and feeling understood, between being included and feeling like I belong.

People can know my humor, my habits, my work, my stories. They can know how I behave around them, the things I say, the person I appear to be. But to say that they know me is far different than for me to say that I know myself when I'm with them. There's a difference between recognizing yourself in someone's company and recognizing that person as someone with whom you can be yourself.

Some people bring out my defenses. Some circumstances require me to be more deliberate about who I am. And then there are people around whom I can relax into myself, almost as if their presence gives me permission to stop managing my own existence quite so carefully. Perhaps the softness I love is less about being a different person and more about being a person who no longer has to brace herself.

I don't think I necessarily want a bigger circle. I think I'm beginning to understand what makes certain relationships more valuable than others. Not how many people know me, or how many places recognize me, but where I can go, who I can be with, and whether I still feel like myself when I get there.

Because you can be familiar to many people and still be unfamiliar with yourself around most of them. You can be invited into someone's world and still not find the version of yourself you most want to inhabit there. You can have a great many people in your life and still feel that very few of them have met the person you most want to be. Or perhaps they have met her, but only in fragments.

I think I want to be known by others, but I also want to recognize myself in the person I get to be with them. I want relationships in which being understood and being myself are not competing experiences. I want to be able to exist without having to work so hard at existing, to be soft without feeling like I'm giving something up, to be familiar enough with someone that I don't have to wonder which version of myself they have come to know.

So yes, people know me. I know a lot of people. But knowing people and finding the places where I can be soft are two very different things. And perhaps the quietest, most meaningful kind of familiarity is finding the people and places where I don't just feel like I belong, but where I recognize myself, too.

JVL