Hey rockstars, 

Whenever I’m in a mood then there are two Netflix movies/specials that I immediately think about: (1) Brené Brown: The Call to Courage; and (2) Dear Zindagi. Both of these are about life and reflection. 

The biggest thing from Brene Brown is the “story I tell myself.” And damn, as an anxious girlie, I tell myself a lot of stories. Most stories by my brain that are horribly mean to myself and convince me that I don’t deserve XYZ good things and do deserve XYZ bad things. The brain is a funny thing. The brain that is both supporting you and rooting for you, is also the one telling you that you are simultaneously not enough and too much. 

But this post, this post is about Dear Zindagi and about distributed loads, special relationships, and the many ways we hold each other up. So here we go. 

Physics Mini Series about Distributed Loads

There is a concept in physics and structural engineering called a distributed load. The basic idea is fairly intuitive: a force does not always act on a structure at a single point. Instead, sometimes the weight is spread across a larger length or surface (e.g., a bridge carries the weight of cars across many beams, a roof distributes its load through rafters, walls, and columns). Even something as simple as lying flat on thin ice instead of standing upright changes the way your weight is distributed across the surface beneath you. The weight itself hasn’t disappeared, it just has been given more places to go.

And lately I’ve been thinking about the distributed loads between people. 

There is a particular story we are told about adulthood, especially about love. Somewhere out there is your person. The person you will call first with good news and bad news. The person you will travel with, come home to, complain to, celebrate with, grow old beside. Your best friend, your confidant, your emergency contact, your favorite person to sit next to at dinner and your favorite person to do absolutely nothing with on a Sunday afternoon. There is something incredibly beautiful about that kind of intimacy. I believe in it. I want it. I want to be someone’s “person,” and I want to look at someone and be like “oh you’re my person.”

But I put a lot of pressure on this idea. And I have to start to wonder when we decided that one person was supposed to carry so much. There is a scene in Dear Zindagi that I have always loved. The idea is that our lives contain many kinds of special relationships – There might be someone with whom you share a particular musical connection, and then someone else who is your perfect coffee companion, and someone with whom you have the very specific and sacred relationship of excellent gossip. And then there is romantic love – not less special, but one special relationship among many.

As I look at my support system, the more true that feels. I have friends I would call when I need perspective and friends I would call when perspective is precisely the last thing I want. There are people who know younger versions of me so well that I barely have to explain how I arrived at the person I am now. There are people who know almost nothing about those earlier chapters but understand exactly who I am today. There are the people I want to travel with and the people I want to sit across from over coffee for three hours. The people who understand my work and the people who remind me that my work is only one part of me. There are people I associate with particular cities and eras of my life, family members who know the stories before I knew they were stories, and friendships that somehow survived several different versions of both of us.

And then there are relationships that change shape almost without announcement: a colleague who becomes a mentor, until one day you realize that this person whose judgment you once sought about work has become someone whose judgment you trust about life. A casual friendship becomes an essential one. Someone you met through circumstance becomes someone you would choose long after the circumstance disappears.

None of these people are interchangeable.

That is why I do not quite mean “redundancy,” even though it is tempting to borrow that word from engineering too. Redundancy makes it sound as though we are collecting replacement parts: a backup friend, an alternate confidant, someone waiting in the wings if another relationship fails.

That is not what a full life feels like. The people in it carry different things. Maybe that is what I love about the idea of distributed loads. The goal is not to eliminate weight. It is not even necessarily to make any one relationship less important. It is simply to recognize that a structure becomes vulnerable when everything depends on a single point.

And culturally, we ask romantic relationships to carry an extraordinary amount. We ask one person to be our lover and our best friend. Our favorite travel companion. Our sounding board. Our social life. Our source of reassurance. The person who shares our interests and supports our ambitions and understands our families and knows exactly how we take our coffee. We expect them to listen to the work problem, come to the family dinner, sit beside us through the frightening things, watch our favorite television show, tolerate the hobby they do not understand, and somehow also remain mysterious enough to keep romance alive. 

That is an enormous structural load. Do I still think that love should have that point load? Well yeah, kind of, I think romantic love can carry more weight without carrying all the weight. I think you should be with someone who does all these things with you and you enjoy doing things with them. 

If you were to audit your relationships, you could ask: “would I get a 3 hour coffee with this person?” and “would I trust them to take care of my pet?” For a lot of people, the answer isn’t yes and yes. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you kick them out, it means you assign different “weight” to that relationship.

There is a version of independence I understood when I was younger that looked a lot like self-sufficiency: Build your own career, Earn your own money, Learn how to take care of yourself, Become someone who can handle things, Construct a life sturdy enough that losing one relationship could never collapse the whole thing. Never be over-reliant on one person because that is not a sustainable life. 

There is enormous value in knowing that your life belongs to you. But adulthood has complicated my definition of independence. Because I do not actually want a life in which I need no one. I want a life in which I have built enough connection that I do not always have to do everything alone.

I want the friend who will tell me when I am being ridiculous and the friend who will occasionally join me in being ridiculous instead. I want people I can learn from and people who learn from me. I want family dinners and long phone calls and old friendships and surprising new ones. I want people who make me more ambitious and people who make me softer. I want people who celebrate the things that matter enormously to me even when those things would barely register in their own lives.

I want the Sunday afternoon Barnes and Nobles trips followed by an art outing, I want someone who says “okay since we have the same taste in music, you should listen to this.” I want someone who texts me “okay so I figured it out – let me tell you the tea.” I want someone who knows when what I really need is to go for a walk and then walk with me for hours as we contemplate life. 

And yes, I want romantic love too. I want the person who knows more of the whole picture than almost anyone else. The person with whom the ordinary parts of life slowly become shared ones. The groceries and inside jokes and hard conversations and trips and future plans. The kind of love that can become a home.

But that should not require dismantling the rest of the life I built. 

A city does not work because it has one extraordinary road, it works because it has streets, sidewalks, bridges, trains, overpasses, etc. There are different routes that take us to different places, and there are some roads we travel every day, while others we visit only occasionally. And then there are those roads that are so familiar that we could navigate them in the dark.

And somewhere along the way, almost without realizing it, I think I have been building that kind of infrastructure: A career I care about, friendships that occupy completely different corners of my heart, family, mentors, places I return to, things I do simply because doing them makes me happy. 

In Taylor Swift’s “New Romantics” song, there is a lyric that goes: “baby I could build a castle, out of all the bricks they threw at me.” I love that line, because it’s the idea that the things meant to bruise us can become building material. But lately I have been thinking about the architecture of that castle too. Because resilience cannot only mean building higher walls.

My friend Artur, who I adore with all my heart, once told me “Yes Sandhya, you can build walls, but don’t build them so high that nobody can get in.” This was right after I had ranted to him and then I was feeling vulnerability-hangover and told him I felt like a burden. He responded: “Well first of all, that’s what friends are for. You’re supposed to be a burden to your friends. The things we do for our friends are usually more than we would do for strangers.” Artur has this ability to be completely 100% wise about everything he talks about all the time. And turns out he was also talking about distributed loads.

But of course that’s the lesson. There is safety in becoming self-sufficient, certainly, and there is safety in learning that you can survive disappointment and there is also safety in knowing you could stand on your own. But a fortress can be structurally sound and still be a lonely place to live. So maybe instead of building something impenetrable, you build something strong enough to have doors. 

The doors that allow people to leave and still let people enter, walls and doors that teach you that love can hurt but you decide to be brave (cue Brene Brown) and choose connection anyway. 

Maybe adulthood is not learning how to carry everything yourself. Maybe it is learning what you can carry, what you can set down, and who you trust enough to say, can you hold this for me for a little while?

Some people will carry pieces of your history. Some will carry your ambition, your silliness, your grief, your doubts, your joy. And if you are very lucky, someone may come along who carries more of it than almost anyone else. May we all be so lucky to find a person who becomes home.

And if we are so lucky, I hope we still have multiple roads leading home: side streets and bridges, familiar turns and unexpected detours. I want people I can lean on, and people who know they can lean on me. I want a life sturdy enough to stand on my own, but open enough that I rarely have to.

And maybe that is what it means to construct a life that is genuinely yours.

Until next time!

xo

Sandhya

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