How Meeting My Neighbors Changed My Life

and finding home right where you’ve always been 🖤

Our subtle slide from May into June has me recalling so many of the ways this month felt last year. In fact, June 7th was the exact day I returned back to Nashville and my tiny apartment after saying a goodbye of an undetermined length the previous January.

I had set out on an extended trip overseas where I was, among other things, intentionally searching for the sensation of “home”. I’d intended to move away from Nashville for years, but my struggle was that I had no idea where to go, no idea where else I would rather be. And I’ve been thinking a lot about that difficult return these past few days – remembering how it felt when I walked through my front door and straight into the dreaded loneliness I had been trying to avoid.

To state it plainly, last summer was excruciatingly uncomfortable and desperately lonely. I was running from a lot and it was hard to be in my body. I couldn’t settle myself because I didn’t know where to begin making sense of everything that had happened during my 4 and a half months away. I felt like I had very few friends in Nashville and I ached for the connections I had forged from London to Lisbon, as well as the rhythm of being in constant motion, feeling so free.

I was also resisting a long overdue break up – only prolonging the extraction process and the corresponding pain. And, to top it all off, I had finally admitted to myself that I had an addiction I was powerless to save myself from and began the recovery journey that turned into a full-fledged spiritual awakening (as they all, in my opinion, inevitably do) – which made it feel for a while there like I was dying. Because in a very real sense, that’s exactly what was happening.

There was goodness coming, but I couldn’t see or imagine it yet. Because I wasn’t supposed to. I know now that I needed to feel the loneliness, the emptiness, the loss first. Because I needed to remember that there is always possibility hidden and waiting within those emotions.

One year later and the sensational quality of my life is shockingly different. There are a thousand reasons for that shift, but I can tell you without an ounce of hesitation or doubt that the biggest, most important, and most life-changing one is that I have become friends with roughly 30 of my neighbors. My actual neighbors. The people who live in the same apartment building as me.

And getting to know my neighbors… actually let me rephrase that… falling absolutely madly in love with my neighbors is one of the most delightful and remarkable things that has ever happened to me in my entire life.

How it happened was pretty simple: After feeling every second of that achingly lonely summer, I opened up to my sweet neighbor Hope (the only one I knew at the time + had known for a few years before moving into the building) about the way I was feeling and how hard it was becoming for me to believe my life would ever feel any different. How much I missed communal gathering and belonging and connection that extends beyond one on one coffee dates with old acquaintances and loud rooftop bars on Saturday nights with people I barely know. In response, she told me all about the garden of good people that was apparently growing in the place where I was already planted.

She introduced me to her neighbor across the hall, Helen – a human superconductor in overalls. To my delight, we immediately clicked and she invited me to a courtyard bonfire that Sunday evening, where all of the other neighbors she had already superconducted with and to each other were going to be. And as cheesy as it sounds, I don’t know how else to say it other than to tell you that the rest is tender, glorious history.

I didn’t have any raw data on this, but luckily Erin found some: A 2018 Pew Research Center survey found that the majority of American adults (57%) knew only a few to none of their neighbors by name. Also of note in the numbers: the amount of people answering “none” goes up as their age goes down. The younger we are, the less likely we are to know ANY of the people that live closest to us. Additionally, only about 40% of the people who say they know a few of their neighbors ever gather with them. There’s some other data saying that only half of American adults trust their neighbors or have face-to-face conversations with them on a weekly basis. (Some sources. In case you’d like to do some extra credit reading on your own.)

Now, I’m going to venture an educated guess here that these numbers haven’t improved much since they were collected. In fact, I’d bet all of the money in my bank account right now that these numbers have, in fact, plummeted further since the physical, mental, emotional, and relational separation that occurred over the past few years because of the lasting impact of the pandemic – including, but not limited to, the ways in which we started overusing tech for connection and gaining social currency for loudly believing the worst about people who aren’t exactly like us. Both to the extreme detriment of our nervous systems.

What I gather from these sources confirms what I’ve suspected: that the beauty and art of neighbor relationships, literal neighbor relationships, is a dying form. Possibly even the idea of a “neighborhood” itself. And though you may not consciously realize it (yet), this is a deep and devastating loss for your body.

What also confirms this suspicion for me is the anecdotal evidence I gather by way of the reactions I receive when I tell people about how much time I spend with my neighbors. The way 20-30 of us gather and meet, formally and informally, multiple times a month. How it’s rare for many of us to go more than a day, maybe two, without seeing each other. How our group text is the most active (and practical!) (and enjoyable!) group text I’ve ever been a part of. How even though some of my oldest and dearest friends in the world live just on the other side of town, my neighbors are the people I spend most of my time with, orient my social life around, and think about/ speak to/ engage with the most in my life. In short: they are my best friends. And I never saw it coming.

I’ve struggled for months with how to even shape language around these relationships for this letter because so much of it feels… indescribably special. Our building is old and we don’t have any fancy amenities, but we have blankets and blow up kiddie pools for the summertime and a firepit and communal dinners during the colder months. Our whole building is on the same radiator system (like I said, it’s old) and the whole damn thing went out on Christmas night. Right away, the group text lit up with everyone making sure everyone else had space heaters or somewhere to get and stay warm until the system was fixed.

I’m one of the lucky few around here that has to walk down three flights of stairs, head outside, and then go to a separate section of the “inside” to do my laundry. On Easter, while doing exactly this, I ran into my neighbor Christina who invited me back outside that evening for her and her partner Tyler’s two little girls’ glow-in-the-dark easter egg hunt.

Now, real quick, something to know about these girls – they’re “the girls”. Yes, they have names and we use them. But we also all know exactly who we’re talking about when we say “the girls”. And the girls have about 30 adult best friends. 🥹

So that night, when I went back outside, our resident former Eagle Scout (literally named Wolf) had started a fire in the firepit and the whole thing turned into a late night spontaneous potluck as neighbor after neighbor just kept saying “I have ‘x’ in my apartment, should I go grab it? Does anyone want some?” By the end of the egg hunt, the picnic table was full and AN ENTIRE CAKE HAD APPEARED. 

We gather for holidays and birthdays and for no reason at all. Most weekends, if you walk out into the courtyard, there are neighbors just sitting, gathering, being – children and puppies and grown adult people all playing.

We run errands and drop off groceries for each other when we’re sick or super busy. We babysit and pet sit and search for lost cats whenever the occasion requires. We walk together to the weekly farmer’s market, city soccer games, and nearest neighborhood diner.

Even the fact that most of this newsletter has been written in starts and stops and spurts and pieces on walks through my neighborhood or in between conversations with my neighbors feels so significant to me. (No joke, in the middle of writing this exact paragraph on my balcony, my creative genius of a next door neighbor Coleman walked out onto his balcony and we had a 20 minute conversation that ended with both of us saying, “I love you!”)

Many of us have a key to each others’ apartments. Multiple neighbors have one to mine. The key I gave to Wolf isn’t even so that he can look after my cat when I travel but because I want him to be able to come over and play my piano whenever he wants to. This is how deeply I trust these human beings.

And I only met them through the random chance of us living very, very close to one another. The “having things in common” part of human relationship came second. And that is astounding to me. In the age of social media and the ability to curate your closest relationships according to shared ideology and/ or interests, a “shared front lawn” as the initial point of connection feels literally miraculous.

The miracle here is the very specific, vulnerable roulette of being “assigned” to relationship with people based exclusively on proximity. The miracle is, also, seeing it as an assignment in the first place. Or maybe a gentler word would be “invitation” because it’s actually the same invitation that all of life offers us all of the time, everywhere: giving your enthusiastic “yes!” to exactly what (and who!) is right in front of you. Right now.

Face-to-face, body-to-body interactions shape our sense of belonging. And the primary thing is: our nervous systems need them, require them, crave them. Our bodies have known this way of being, this type of human connection, for far longer than we have been asking them to forget in favor of app-based optimization and association.

There is so much power and pleasure in choosing to give your full presence to the living beings, human and non-human, in your own neighborhood. There is so much raw delight in knowing and trusting your neighbors because there is an art to the practice of gathering for gathering’s sake – not to spend money or witness a specific event. Not that those are bad things, I just think we’ve largely forgotten that they aren’t EVERYthing.

“Neighboring” feels like community building divested from our larger Culture of Consumption. The simplicity of neighborhood gathering is, to me, the peak of “the sweetness of doing nothing” or “dolce far niente”, as it’s said by the Italians — who perfected the practice and invented the phrase. (Related: “passeggiata” is Italian for “a leisurely walk or stroll” and also my new all-time favorite word. There’s a reason that so much of my nervous system reset last year happened in Italy. They’re my kind of people.)

There’s more to say about my neighbors and how much I adore them… I left about half of the original draft of this letter on the cutting room floor (my former thesis advisors would be so proud 🥲). But much of it feels too sacred to share. I mean, how do I even begin to describe the way it feels to fall asleep every night knowing I am literally surrounded by love on all sides? And, anyway, I’m not even exactly sure what I’m trying to accomplish here beyond just bragging on these perfect people and offering you the ability to imagine what might be possible in your own backyard. Or front yard. Or courtyard. Or culdesac.

And maybe also to say this: I know now how ironic and beautiful and funny and fundamentally true it is that I found the home I went looking for all across the globe exactly in the place I had left. Because these people, my neighbors, have been here the whole time. I know now how much it matters that I have found family in the people that are literally, physically closest to me. Because it has allowed my body to remember her belonging – the illusion of her aloneness and the reality of her safety.

The reality that at any and every given moment there is actually way more going right in the world than there is going wrong. The reality that people are good and kind and safe and can be trusted – even people with different opinions and ideologies than mine (shocking, I know). Because those opinions and ideologies and even some of our tightest-gripped identities start to shrink and fall away when “stranger” becomes “neighbor” instead. 🖤

P.S. If you’ve got a great neighbor story or if this little love letter ends up inspiring you to meet a neighbor or two (my actual highest hope here), feel free to reply to this email and share it with me! I love reading the sweet notes y’all send and the stories you share in response to mine. It’s truly my favorite thing.

Oh hey, here’s your playlist for June!

And since June is Erin’s birthday month, I have a good feeling about this one…