People that change you
There are the obvious people that shape and form you, like your parents and your teachers when you're growing up.
Hopefully they were loving and good role models and took care of you and showed you love and taught you wisdom. If they were absent or cruel, they still left a mark on you.
We are in a big way, for better or worse, the product of our upbringing and childhood influences.
I had some special teachers that were memorable.
One of my teachers from when I was 12, I actually reached out to last year to thank her for teaching me and to tell her that she was a great teacher and helped me. It was neat remembering things with her on the phone that happened over two decades ago. The idea to contact her came because while I was going through stuff getting ready to move, I found a piece of paper on which I'd written, a decade ago, a bunch of names under categories like "5 people who were always there for you", "5 people who helped shape you" and things like that.
Then there are people who change you in ways you don't like.
An experience I had when I was 15 made me afraid, and I didn't like feeling that way.
We all are wired to seek out human interaction one way or another. Even people who sit at home and watch TV shows are engaging with the stories, voices, facial expressions, and actions of the characters as sort of a proxy for real life interactions, which may be too difficult for them. Texting, webcamming, gaming, and other online interactions are just more ways that people seek to connect with other people, even in today's day and age where face-to-face interaction is at an all-time low.
All this quarantine business is lowering that even more.
You can have an enjoyable experience interacting with a great many different people, whether it's a cashier, a distant pen pal, or someone you play tennis or another game with, but it's the highs and lows that stand out.
The people you enjoy the most, connect with the most, bond with the most are your highlights. The people who bring negativity or pain to your life are the low points that change you sometimes in ways you really don't like. Anger, bitterness, and pain are things that are no fun to live with.
The number of people who were enjoyable and came into my life for a period of time are hard to number, there are that many. I moved around a lot in my life, I think over 20 times by the time I was a young adult. When I think of the faces, they appear one after the other as a pleasant little drop of nostalgia. They are like comets in the night sky, a burst of light before they're gone.
But there are a few people I've come across who are like little suns in your life. They bring warmth and light on a whole other level. They radiate life into your life on a whole other level.
These are people you can talk with for hours on end about anything. They're people you can hang out with til 4 am even when you have to wake up after a few hours of sleep. They're people you laugh with a ton. It's hard to describe the kind of connection where two people are just on the same wavelength, the best kind of human connection that is even possible, and I'm doing such a feeble job describing it.
When one of these suns goes out, it leaves a mark on you. Don't let the darkness consume you. There is more light out there.
Be open to new people. Love again, trust again, feel again, laugh again...remember everyone shares this messy, sometimes crazy experience we call life, we are all scarred in some way, and maybe, just maybe, you can be a light for someone else who was floundering in the dark.
Open your eyes. Go forth and smile at strangers.
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