The Gravity of Others

The Gravity of Others

(A Reflection on Learning to Be Human in Solitude)

I have always been a satellite, orbiting the gravitational pull of other people’s personalities, their moods, their expectations. In their presence, I become a reflection of what I think they need me to be—more cheerful for the optimist, more serious for the intellectual, more agreeable for the peacekeeper. I shift and bend like light through a prism, fracturing into a thousand different versions of myself.

It took me years to realize I had no idea who I was when no one was watching.

Alone in my apartment, stripped of an audience, I faced a terrifying question: without someone else’s gravitational field to define my orbit, who am I? The silence that greeted this inquiry was deafening. I had become so skilled at being who others needed that I had forgotten how to simply be.

This shapeshifting felt like kindness, like emotional intelligence, like the mark of a person who cared deeply about connection. But underneath the noble veneer was something more unsettling: a deep-seated belief that my authentic self was not enough, that who I really was would be met with disappointment or rejection.

So I learned to read rooms like a survival skill, to sense the emotional weather of every space I entered and adjust my inner climate accordingly. I became fluent in the language of other people’s comfort, but remained illiterate in the dialect of my own needs.

The pandemic gave me an unwanted gift: enforced solitude. Stripped of the constant feedback loop of other people’s reactions, I was forced to confront the stranger living in my own skin. Without an audience, my performance began to feel absurd, like an actor rehearsing lines to an empty theater.

In the beginning, the silence was unbearable. I filled it desperately with podcasts, music, television—anything to drown out the unfamiliar sound of my own thoughts without the editing and filtering I usually performed for public consumption. But gradually, in the spaces between the noise, I began to hear something I hadn’t noticed before: my own voice, unmodulated by the need to please.

I discovered that I liked things I had never allowed myself to like. I had opinions I had never voiced. I had dreams I had abandoned because they didn’t fit the version of myself I thought others expected. I began to understand that authenticity wasn’t about being the same person in every situation—that would be rigid, not genuine. It was about remaining connected to some core truth about myself regardless of the social weather.

The most difficult lesson was learning that not everyone would like this more authentic version of me, and that this was not only acceptable but necessary. For years, I had collected people like trophies, proof that I was likeable, worthy, safe. But these relationships were built on performances, not on genuine connection.

Some people fell away when I stopped contorting myself to fit their expectations. This felt like failure at first, like evidence that my fears were justified—I really wasn’t enough as I was. But slowly, I began to see these departures differently. They were making room for people who could love me without requiring me to be anyone other than who I actually am.

Solitude taught me that the most important relationship I will ever have is the one with myself. It is the foundation upon which all other connections are built. When I know who I am, I can share that self genuinely. When I accept my own complexity, I can stop demanding simplicity from others.

I am still learning to exist in my own gravitational field, but the pull of others remains strong. The old patterns reassert themselves in moments of stress or uncertainty—the automatic reading of emotional weather, the instinctive adjustment of personality to match the room’s needs.

Some days I can maintain my own orbit. Other days I find myself sliding back into familiar patterns of accommodation, wondering if authentic connection is possible for someone who learned so early that love was conditional on performance.

The solitude taught me who I am when no one is watching, but it could not teach me how to remain that person when someone is. That lesson, it seems, must be learned again and again, in each encounter, with each person who enters my gravitational field and threatens to pull me back into the old dance of becoming what others need.

Perhaps this is not a problem to be solved but a tension to be managed—the space between authentic self and relational self, between standing alone and connecting with others. The gravity of others will always exert its pull. The question is whether I can maintain enough of my own mass to stay in orbit rather than being consumed entirely.