The Figure Eight

Recently I nearly left a party early to go dancing.

I caught myself halfway to the door. Everyone else had gone. What remained was my friend’s core group, the ones who’d been at dinner the night before too. After a ridiculous game that involved pulling costumes out of a bag and putting them on at random, I was laughing so hard I forgot I had somewhere else to be.

And then I realised something. I am one of her core people. Not a periodic guest who drifts in and out of this circle every few years. One of the ones who stays on the couch after the party is over.

We were all dancing around, some of us still in fancy dress.  I thought to myself, “Why do I always have somewhere else to be?” This is a pattern of mine. Even if it was to go do something I love, it occurred to me that I was fragmenting my presence. So I stayed.

What connection actually looks like

I talk about wanting connection all the time. Dancing gives me plenty of it, the kind that moves through the body, joyful and real. But the other night reminded me there is another kind, the kind you can only get sitting still with people who already know your history, or are about to.

It started with parenting stories, the funny, slightly awful ones we all have. I told mine. Someone told theirs. And somewhere in the laughter, one of the women mentioned she had been struck by lightning twice. I mentioned my own history of severe electrocution. A couple more electrocution stories emerged.

And that was how we found out we were all in a club none of us had applied for.

The invisible club

There is something strange and specific that happens between people who have been badly electrocuted. You do not know you are in the club until you meet someone else who is. Then suddenly there is this current of recognition, no drama attached, just a shared knowing, like you found someone who speaks a dialect you thought only you knew.

Once the first story was told, the conversation expanded to danger we’d al experienced in our childhoods. Political danger. A childhood in Chile during the coup. Bomb threats at school, the fear of kidnapping. A tin of razor blades and a tourniquet carried to school as a child in case of a rattlesnake bite. A houseman attacked by bees, falling from a ladder while everyone below could only watch. Each of us had been marked early by some flavour of danger, and each of us had somehow turned it into the raw material of who we became.

What struck me most was how one of the women told her most vulnerable story without a trace of drama, as though narrating something curious that had simply happened to her once. That is not something you fake. That is what real healing sounds like from the outside, a story held with such steadiness it can finally be told plainly, even to near strangers, at a dinner table.

The loneliness underneath

Later, one of the women said something quieter. That despite everything, she is often alone in this kind of depth. That the women in her life who go this deep with her are rare.

I recognised it instantly. I work alone. I live alone. And for all my dancing and my full calendar, this specific thing, sitting at a table where the conversation moves between something profound and something completely ridiculous within the same breath, is what I actually crave.

So I said the obvious thing. Let’s not let this be a lovely memory we each carry alone. Let’s actually stay in touch. Texts. Calls. Real ones.

I can only do my own small part of that. But last night I understood something about connection I think I already knew and kept forgetting: it is not one thing. It moves. Deep one moment, howling with laughter over ice cream and a joke the next, then quiet again. In and out, over and over, all night.

A figure eight. No beginning, no end, just a shape that keeps folding back into itself.

That is what connection actually is. Not a straight line of meaningful conversation, but a weave. And I had forgotten, until last night, how much I have been missing exactly that shape.

I am blessed in that I have dear, close friends around the world, but it is rare that I am ever sitting around a table with more than one of them at a time!  And then to discover the electrical current we all share was fascinating and interesting that we all ended up at the table together.

If I had left, sure I would have enjoyed dancing as usual, but I would have missed the profound connections and hilarity shared.

Sometimes even your good patterns – like prioritising dancing for me – can be keeping you from something more important if you’re not flexible to notice the flow you are in at the moment.

If you’ve ever been electrocuted, I’d really like to hear about it! Please email me or book a call.  Or if you just want to look at your imbedded patterns we can unpick those too! https://bit.ly/MyTruthMap