126. Being Noticed

October 20, 2023•Ep. 126•5 min 54 sec

Finding The Silver Lining

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Nora shares how one of the best feelings in the world is just being noticed by someone else.

About It's Going to Be OK

If you have anxiety, depression or any sense of the world around you, you know that not *everything* is going to be okay. In fact, many things aren’t okay and never will be!

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Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

INTRO MUSIC

As a kid, I would often think I was going to die of embarrassment, especially if I was out in public with my grandfather. Bill was tall and wiry, with that old-man barrel chest teetering on top of a pair of legs that had been made spindly by rickets as a child.

Bill had a big voice, and if he saw a person, he had to talk to them. It was as though he was physically incapable of not saying hello to someone. Pulling up at the gas station? He’s gotta comment on the price of gas, or just READ A SIGN OUT LOUD FOR NO REASON! God forbid he take me to get ice cream, he’d have the gall to ask the cashier something like “how’s business today?”

I hated when he talked to strangers, but I loved it when he talked to me. Every few months, when we saw each other, he’d tell me “YOU GET MORE BEAUTIFUL EVERY DAY” even though the photographic evidence of my awkward years makes it clear that he was lying.

As we drove places together, he’d make up little songs for me. There’s a dip in the road, I think it’s my brother, it might be Austin but it could be the other.”

I recently overheard a conversation between some kids where one of them told the other “You know what makes me feel so good? When someone says hi to me. I get a feeling in my stomach like ooooh! I’m being noticed!”

This kid was talking about teachers at school, not strangers, by the way.

We are, according to many experts, in the middle of a loneliness epidemic, and I think many of us know what this kid is talking about: the feeling of knowing that someone quite literally sees you, and that you matter enough to be acknowledged.

It’s the same feeling I got when my Grandpa would slip me a brach’s caramel from the jar he kept in his cabin. The feeling I got when my mom would ask me to run an errand with her, and the two of us would just tool around Minneapolis, shopping for wallpaper or bushes for the front yard or whatever it was she needed. It’s the feeling I still get when I walk into a crowded room alone and meet someone’s eye.

It’s a feeling that’s harder to come by now that we spend so much time ALONE, or at least I do. It’s a feeling that we can give each other, and I hope you get it today.

OUTRO MUSIC

CREDITS