Somebody Needs You to Try
I came across the work of Darcy Marie Mayfield this week. Her website says she “helps communities design hospitality-driven experiences that go far beyond incentives, offering remote workers and new transplants … a reason to stay, a place to belong.” In her article Why Every City Should Have a Hospitality Department, she talks about how towns and cities welcome tourists better than residents:
“We talk endlessly about economic incentives and housing stock and walkability scores and innovation hubs, but almost no one is talking about the moment a human shows up with a suitcase and a dog and realizes they don’t know where to buy a plunger or who might go for a coffee with them.”
I actually got choked up reading that last line out loud to my husband.
I talk a lot here about connection and how to create and build it for yourself. We discuss how improving your relationship skills will make you less lonely, healthier, and provide you with more opportunities and resources. We talk about belonging and what it means to have roots and foster community. Mindsets, identity shifts, barriers, and frameworks. All of this is important, crucial work in the effort of getting back into the practice of connecting with humans in real life.
But I don’t often talk about what that looks like from the other side. On the other side of your uncertainty, your social anxiety, your awkwardness is a person who might desperately need a lifeline. A person who is as scared and nervous as you are. A person who is waiting for just one hello to try again and start in a new place or a new job. A human who is doing their very best to become someone new, someone different.
And it isn’t just about those who’ve moved across the country or started a new job. It’s every person who shows up somewhere alone and unsure. A neighbor carrying groceries, a co-worker sitting at lunch, the person at the café who orders the same coffee every morning. Everyone carries some version of that fear and that hope for connection.
When you think your neighbor doesn’t care or your co-worker isn’t interested or that stranger at a coffee shop already has their people, try anyway. Not because it will save the world but because that person might need just a little humanity. These gestures remind someone that they exist in the space with us, that they’re not invisible. Make eye contact, see them. Say hello, acknowledge them. Ask how their day is, hear them.
When we give another human that moment of our attention, it changes something inside us, too. It reminds us that we aren’t alone. It reminds us that our gestures, however small, can ripple farther than we imagine.
Belonging isn’t a thing you earn or inherit. It’s not a badge or a title. Belonging is a practice, a series of moments. It grows in the spaces between us, in the attention we give to each other.
If you want to get better at noticing the humans around you or simply feel more confident creating connection in your life, my Overcoming Underconnecting workbook walks you step by step. Sometimes all it takes is one conversation, one hello, or one small gesture to start practicing in a meaningful way. Explore it today and take the next step toward the connections and support that someone needs you to try for.
