LOVE WANT Issue 21:  Closer to me

Last week, over text, all 1555 km away, I asked Mum what the word ‘Closeness’ meant to her. She responded with the words ‘Together,’ ‘United,’ and ‘Intimate’ yet, like everyone else, it’s been a year of us learning how to do together from afar. 

While border restrictions are a new concept, connecting, and the act of seeking connection has always been an important aspect of life. Speaking for the random cross-section of people I know, ‘we’ feel pretty well versed in ‘closeness’, knowing it asks for genuine connection; we also know it asks for vulnerability, but somehow that’s still a lot harder. 

Closeness speaks to the intensely personal nature of life. The ultimate study of intimacy, it’s sometimes awkward, and often soothing. It’s an honest desire to see others and have them see you too in the hope that together, you can just be. It requires sharing and demands vulnerability, because without those, how truly close are we?

Unlike closeness, the ideas of connection and vulnerability have never been intricately linked with geography. Take that geography, that physical being with one another away, and we’re seeing closeness in a whole new, sacred light. 

Once reserved for the more private moments of our lives, ‘connection’ has publicly become our collective coping mechanism. Openly talking about how we know closeness has become an act of sheer survival - sowing the seeds of gratitude and basking in dopamine rays that find their way through the clouds. “Closeness is to know humanity” put Artistic Director Rafael Bonachela in his conversation with me. The truest of that humanity I’ve known this year has been patience; those I experience closeness with giving me the time and space to just be. Sometimes that vulnerable self shows up and offers an honest or productive conclusion about something, but most of the time we run around in very subtle circles that can only be put down to avoidance. While I’m by all means that way inclined, I read recently that ‘It can be unsettling to be seen,’ and immediately thought, ‘especially by yourself’ which probably sums up how I feel about vulnerability.

Confronted with our own image all day long, and more than ever, internal conflict seems unavoidable. Second to that, in a time of heightened sharing, there’s little distinction between what we choose to give of ourselves and what we choose to keep. Having been stuck with myself for the past six months, and feeling disconnected from my reflection a lot of that time, I’ve realised that the parts I’m tightly guarding against vulnerability are the parts of me I have no ‘solution’ for; untidy little messes I’ve already gone around in circles with, opting to bury rather than air. 

But if the humanity of closeness, and that very patience, has taught me anything this year it's that the fixation on personal resolve as a motivation for sharing is not where true closeness is found at all. Solved or not, sharing is to sit in closeness, and together or apart, vulnerability will take you there.