Borrowed Bodies

On a kind of presence that depends on other people being in the room.

One of the things I have come to understand, slowly, is that some people are made mostly of other people.

I don’t mean this in the obvious sense: that we are influenced by those around us, shaped by relationships, formed by attachment. I mean something more specific and more somatic. There are people whose nervous systems regulate through proximity to other bodies. Whose sense of being a self firms up in the presence of faces, voices, the small unconscious choreography of people sharing a room. Alone, the signal goes faint. Something that felt stable a moment ago becomes uncertain at the edges.

Most of them do not know this is how they work. It is the water they are swimming in. It only becomes visible when the bodies go away.

A lot of people learned this about themselves during the pandemic. Many of my colleagues did. The in-person session, two bodies in a room attuning without speaking, turned out to be doing more of the work than we realized. When it disappeared and the flat glowing rectangle arrived in its place, something wobbled. The skills did not change. The training did not change. Something essential was suddenly missing. I had thought I was an in-person therapist by preference. It turned out I was an in-person therapist by necessity.

What the pandemic made visible, for some of us, had been there long before 2020. People who grow up in places where having their own anything feels unsafe often become highly developed in other directions. They learn to read rooms. They track moods, expressions, tones, small changes in atmosphere. These are real capacities. They can look like intuition, empathy, social intelligence, even ease.

For people organized this way, it does not feel like a strategy. It feels like reality. You orient through other people’s eyes. You regulate through their presence. You know what you feel by tracking what they feel. It is not manipulative and it is not conscious. The system simply needs company to organize around.

A surprising number of things can count as company. Live news murmuring in the background. A small, overambitious home improvement project. Or the more exciting and more costly kind, the kind that reaches back: recycling an old boyfriend, picking up some habit that works at first and leaves more despair behind it.

The loneliness of this mode is specific. It is not the loneliness of being unseen. People shaped this way are often very well seen. It is the loneliness of being unable to locate yourself when no one else is looking. A faint, recurring blankness in the moments alone. The body reaching reflexively for another body to steady against and finding none.

Sometimes when I slow anxiety down, I find something that looks a lot like this. The reach. The absence of anything to reach toward. The nervous system escalating in search of something to organize around.

For a long time I assumed the only answer to the reach was another body. If the self went faint when I was alone, the cure was company: more faces, more rooms, more proximity. It did not occur to me there might be somewhere else to steady against.

What I eventually found was quieter, and harder to trust. A way of turning attention inward and discovering that something was already there. Not a thought about my experience, but the experience itself, with its own texture and weight, waiting to be noticed. The body was not only the thing that reached. It was also a place I could listen from.

It was faint at first, and unconvincing. I had spent so long orienting through other people that my own interior felt like a room I had never furnished. But it held. And slowly, in the moments alone, there was something to reach toward after all. Something that had been there the whole time, on the inside, asking only to be met.