Editor's Note: When you really love an experience, you seek it again and again. That's why reruns are so popular! What I'm trying to say is: Love Notes writer Stephanie K. Hopkins is on a break this week, but who wants to go a whole week without reading her meditations on love? Not me! So we agreed to share, for a second time, one of her most popular Love Notes columns ever--this piece about “people who need people,” originally published April 14, 2012. Enjoy it all over again (or for the first time, if you missed the original run).
By Stephanie K. Hopkins
The past two weeks I’ve been living every writer’s dream. A writing residency by the ocean with uninterrupted alone time to write, read, and slowly eat myself up alive.
It came at a perfect time. My small town was starting to feel too small, and I was looking forward to my own uncomplicated company for awhile.
I’m one of those stubborn people who thinks that I should be able to do everything by myself. It could be my stoic New England background, where anything short of pulling one’s own teeth out is a sign of weakness. Throw out moldy bread? What are you, some kind of whiner? It’s just Penicillin is all. Our ancestors ate moldy bread all the time and didn’t complain. And why go to a doctor when the house is stocked with perfectly good surgical implements (tweezers, vegetable peelers, machetes) and anesthesia (vodka, to be taken orally).
If you need those kinds of things. I’m the one waving away the tourniquet because I believe I should be able to stop the hemorrhaging on the bloody stump of my leg by myself. With my mind.
This stubborn sense of independence can carry over to relationships as well. I don’t need anyone, I tell myself, I just enjoy their company. I might love you, but need you? That’s crazy talk. What do you take me for? Some kind of weakling? At which point I storm out to the field in my pioneer girl outfit. “I’ll chop my own wood, thank you very much!”
This is the kind of talk that should, at this point, send blaring red alarms off inside me. It’s the kind of self-badgering that caused me to almost die in Costa Rica when I dared myself to go down a water slide that looked scary. What are you, some kind of a scaredy-cat? I berated myself. You used to love water slides! Turns out the water slide looked scary for a reason; it was scary, and unregulated, and it turned me into a water slide bullet.
But old habits aren’t easy to break. So when I began this two-week venture that promised time away from the world, I knew great things would happen. Not only would I finally master the self-discipline I needed to churn out an entire novel, but I would exercise regularly, eat well, and finally come up with a plan for achieving world peace.
Well…almost two weeks into the uninterrupted company of my own savage mind, I call Uncle. No wood has been chopped, no houses built from scratch, no bloody stumps salvaged. I have written, thank goodness, but certainly not an entire novel. For the first three days I ate quinoa and kale and speed-walked my way around one corner of the island. “Look at me!” I wanted to tell everyone. “I don’t need anyone!”
But where were all the witnesses to my superior independence? My accomplishments just didn’t feel the same when they happened, well, alone. I thought briefly about interrupting the six fabulous writers at the residency with me, who were no doubt saving the world in their rooms while I was slowly disintegrating in mine (they would get my vote any day), and yelling throughout the house, “I ate quinoa! I ate an apple! I wrote a whole page on my own!”
It was Day Four when things started to turn and I learned that, when left to my own devices, I am less likely to solve the problem of world peace and most likely to do the following:
- Eat increasingly alarming amounts of dairy products, including cheese, ice cream, Greek yogurt, European butter, and cheese.
- Take a lot of baths with a lot of tequila. Sometimes twice a day.
- Find it more and more challenging to get to the cheese, and so make little piles within easy reach, which kind of resemble wood piles, except they are cheese.
- Take weird pictures of myself with my eyes crossed and tongue out and send them to friends with captions like, “Memba’ me?” and “I’m alive!”
- Name the tequila bottle “Wilson” and make him a hat out of tissues. Send pictures to friends with captions like, “Just me and my shadow!” And “Tequila?! I hardly know ya!”
- Use the bathtub to re-enact the Cast Away scene in which Wilson floats away.
My dogs don’t feel any shame for needing people. Sure, they might take it to the extreme by trying to herd everyone in the same room all the time (though I have to admit, right now that sounds deliciously cozy). Max gets so close when I’m walking that his snout bumps into the back of my knees. I’ll feel a tap tap tap when I’m shuffling around the kitchen and say to him, “Right on my heels, Max, right on my heels,” but he doesn’t care. Or he’ll wiggle his way up from the bottom of the bed and wake me with his snout against my snout, breathing my breath.
Cats have more pride, but they’re not immune to needing love. They’ll never admit it; they’ll just pretend that they happened to be going into the same room as you. Oh what a coincidence, you’re in the study too?
I’ve met people who’ve spent months alone in a woodsy cabin or out at sea. I’ve always admired their kind and also secretly tried to peer inside their brains to see what they’re made of. I’ve always thought they were stronger than me, but maybe they’re just different.
When my grandmother was alive, my mom and I would massage lotion into her aged hands. Such a simple act, but such a loving one. We couldn’t prevent my grandmother’s stroke, but we could make sure her hands were soft and comfortable. My grandmother was a stubborn woman too, like me, and would have probably insisted on doing it herself if she could. But she responded to our touch, and this brought us comfort in the face of life’s difficult mysteries.
If we don’t let ourselves need, we don’t let others be needed. We deprive those we love of the comfort that comes from caring for us. And we teach them that it’s not okay for them to need anything as well.
Needing love, or a community, or the friends in a small town, or whatever it is that keeps us from camping out in the cheese drawer, doesn’t have to mean we have no sense of self or self-worth, or that we don’t know who we are outside of other people’s company. Needing people doesn’t have to mean that we’re needy. It means we’re human.
The irony is, if we stomp around chopping our own wood all the time, we can easily chop our way into a bad back and then be forced to let others help us when we can’t get out of bed. So we might as well accept their help and their company to begin with.
Besides, even cheese tastes better with a friend, especially when that friend isn’t a half-empty bottle of tequila in a tissue hat.
Stephanie writes short stories, non-fiction, and young adult fiction. She recently finished a young adult novel, "Edge of Seventeen," and is working on a memoir about her adventures as an ex-professor turned bartender. You can reach her at stephaniehop@gmail.com and follow her on Twitter @stephaniehop1.
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