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I’m very good at making first impressions on people I’ve known for years. Even with my closest friends, I feel the need to present my best self at all times. And that takes preparation.
Text before you call. Let’s find a time. Thursday works. Two o’clock is perfect. Give me 20 minutes, and I’ll become the version of myself I’d like you to meet. I’ll put on a better shirt. I’ll remember my funniest stories. I’ll shake off whatever disappointment or irritation I’ve been carrying around all day. By the time you arrive, you’ll be seeing someone carefully assembled.
Recently I realized that I’ve spent years becoming presentable. The problem is that I may also have become a little unfindable.
The Self We Edit
While recording an episode of 50 Words for Snow, the podcast where my co-host Emily John Garces and I explore words that have no direct English equivalent, we spoke with Kacheve Stafford, co-host of The Healing Room podcast, who grew up in Trinidad and Tobago. He introduced us to the Trinidadian word lime.
To lime isn’t simply to socialize. It’s to gather. You hear music coming from someone’s house and wander over. A pot is already cooking. Friends arrive without warning. Somebody brings drinks. Somebody else starts dancing. The gathering grows naturally because the point isn’t to host an event. The point is simply to be together. Kacheve described it as a way of building family and community, where people don’t need an invitation to belong.
What fascinated me wasn’t just the word itself. It was the assumption underneath it. Nobody has 20 minutes to become impressive. Nobody gets time to rehearse. You answer the door as the person you happen to be that day.
My own social life often feels like the opposite. I schedule weeks in advance. I think about what to wear, what to bring, whether we’ll be interesting enough, funny enough, rested enough. Even dinner with close friends can start to feel like a small performance.
Becoming Findable
I’m starting to realize the people closest to us probably don’t need our best stories. They don’t need us at our funniest, our most productive, or our most charming. They may simply want access to the person who’s having an ordinary Tuesday. The one who’s tired. The one whose kitchen isn’t clean. The one who answers the door before she’s had a chance to become someone else.
Listening to Kacheve describe liming made me realize that community may not be built by showing each other our highlights. It may be built by interrupting one another’s ordinary lives. There is something deeply trusting about assuming you can arrive exactly as you are and that whoever opens the door will be glad you came anyway.
I’m not sure I’m ready for surprise visitors. The thought still makes me a little anxious. But I do wonder what it would be like to become the sort of person who hears music and walks toward it instead of checking the calendar first. Or the sort of person who leaves the door unlocked while the pot is on.
Perhaps intimacy begins the moment we stop rehearsing for the people who already love us.
