Liebe Kunden, Kollegen, Mitarbeiter, Freunde und Familie,
One morning not long ago, I woke up later than usual. Before I had even made my coffee, something felt off, the way it sometimes does when you leave the house and can’t remember whether you locked the door. It took me a moment to understand what was missing: I hadn’t written to anyone yet.
Every morning, before my day properly begins, I send messages. A good morning to my daughters, to friends scattered between France, Germany and here, to someone going through a hard time, to a person who crossed my mind for no particular reason at all. I also send short inspirational messages to all my peeps on social media to help everyone greet the day from a positive or thoughtful place. Some mornings it is a photo from my walk, some mornings just a few words, some mornings a long note to someone I know is struggling. I have been doing this for so long that it has become as natural to me as my morning stretches, and I feel off if I don’t do it.
That late morning, though, after realizing I hadn’t written to anyone yet, a mischievous little thought crept in (saboteurs can be very creative before coffee). Nobody had written to ask whether I was all right. Nobody had sent a “where’s my good morning?”
And I wondered: what if I stopped for a week? Purely as a scientific experiment, of course. Would anyone notice? Would anyone write first?
I confess the thought went even further. I have, on more than one occasion, imagined my own funeral. No, don’t call me! I am perfectly well; this is simply the kind of thing a person with a vivid imagination and a flair for drama might do over breakfast. I picture the room and wonder who would be there, and whether anyone would stand up and say:
She wrote to me every single morning, and it mattered.
My daughters have come to me with the same observation in their own words: “Mama, I’m always the one who reaches out. Rarely does someone initiate … or even answer back.” I told them what life as an expatriate taught me long ago. When I moved to the United States at 26 and left my whole world behind in Europe, I learned that if I didn’t initiate, nobody would. The people who loved me weren’t heartless; they were busy living their lives on the other side of an ocean. So I became the one who writes first, and I made my peace with it. … Or so I thought.
Something just happened this past week that made me wonder how solid that “peace” really was. I was giving a workshop at a conference when a woman I barely recognized stood up in front of thirty people and told me I had changed her life in a similar workshop at a similar conference a few years back. I felt my face turn beet red. I almost didn’t tell you this story, since it sounds like bragging, and the French in me finds bragging deeply vulgar. Yet her words filled my “being seen and acknowledged” cup and for days afterward I felt like I was walking on air.
Maybe I wasn’t that peaceful after all? Maybe something was missing the whole time and I hadn’t realized it?
SO … WHICH IS IT???
Do I write to people every morning because I love them and want them to know it, expecting nothing in return, like the wise woman I pretend to be in these newsletters? Or …
Do I, like everybody else, need to hear that I matter too?
PART 2
So … I decided not to run my little experiment. No week of silence, no waiting for someone to notice, no counting who would write first. I was relieved to have made that decision, and a bit ashamed of how relieved I was. If I truly expected nothing in return, why would the answer frighten me?
The same morning, over coffee, I told Michael all of it: the messages I send every day, the feeling that I am always the one pouring out while very little flows back, even the funeral fantasy (he didn’t call anyone either). He listened well, as he does. Then in true Michael-style, he asked me one simple question:
“Why do you do it in the first place?”
My answer came without hesitation. I write to these people because I love them, and I want them to know they are cared about and for. That is the whole reason, and it is a good one. If I hold on to that, Michael wisely suggested, the counting (of who writes first) becomes beside the point.
He was right, of course. Yet a second answer was hiding right behind the first, and it took me a little longer to say it out loud (so I whispered it while choking up): I wish people cared about me as much as I care about them.
There you go. The wise coach and the little girl standing side by side, both telling the truth.
Not ego: a need
For a while I felt embarrassed by that second answer. It sounded like I “give” in order to “get”, which is not a flattering portrait of oneself. Michael pushed back. It’s human, he said. We all want to matter. Wanting acknowledgement isn’t vanity; it’s part of being a person among other people.
This is exactly what Alfred Adler taught a century ago. Regular readers and Adlerian fellows will recognize this word, Gemeinschaftsgefühl, the feeling of community. For Adler, the deepest goal behind human behavior is to belong, and we feel belonging when we feel significant: when we sense that we count, that our presence makes a difference to someone or to a group. He described two great movements in every life, becoming capable on our own and connecting with others, and he considered our relationships with friends and community one of the essential tasks that life asks of each of us.
Here is the catch: nobody can feel significant in a vacuum. I can tell myself all day long that I matter, but the feeling only becomes real when it is mirrored back to me by another human being. Adler put it rather bluntly: it is the person who is not interested in others who has the greatest difficulties in life and causes the greatest harm to others. Those of us at the other end of that spectrum, deeply interested in others, pay a different price. We don’t cause the harm; we are exposed to it. We care, so we can be hurt.
Why it hurts so much
If you have ever felt a sting when a message you sent sat unanswered, I want you to know that you are not being dramatic. Your brain is doing exactly what it was built to do, and you share that sting with just about every human being who ever lived.
In 2003, psychologist Naomi Eisenberger and her colleagues at UCLA invited people to play a simple computer game of catch with two other players, while their brains were being scanned. After a few rounds, the other two players stopped throwing the ball to the participant. That was all. A virtual ball, and players who did not even exist: the participants believed they were playing with two strangers, but the game was a computer program. Yet the brain regions that lit up during this small exclusion overlapped with those involved in processing physical pain. Being left out, it turns out, registers in the body as an injury.
A few years earlier, psychologists Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary had gathered the evidence that the need to belong is a fundamental human motivation, almost as compelling as the need for food. Sociologists Morris Rosenberg and Claire McCullough gave a name to the particular piece of this I was struggling with that morning: mattering, the feeling that others are interested in us, depend on us, and would miss us if we were gone. Psychologist Gordon Flett (in his book “The Psychology of Mattering”) has since linked feelings of not mattering to depression, anxiety and a painful sense of being invisible. He also makes a distinction I found striking: we can belong to a group and still feel that we don’t matter to it.
The stakes are not only emotional. In 2010, Julianne Holt-Lunstad and her colleagues analyzed 148 studies involving more than 300,000 people and found that those with strong social relationships had about a 50% greater likelihood of survival over the study period than those with weak ones. In 2023, drawing on her work, the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory on what he called an epidemic of loneliness, comparing the health risk of social disconnection to smoking up to fifteen cigarettes a day.
So when I wish people cared about me as much as I care about them, I am not asking for a trophy. I am asking for something my brain and my body treat as vital.
What they are not telling us
Other research I found gave me some comfort, along with a surprise.
In 2022, Peggy Liu and her colleagues published a series of experiments involving close to 6,000 people about the simple act of reaching out: a short message to check in, a little gift, a note saying “I was thinking of you.” Over and over, the people doing the reaching out underestimated how much it would be appreciated. The recipients valued the gesture far more than the senders expected.
The detail that caught my attention was this: the gap was largest when the contact came as a surprise. When someone hears from an old friend out of the blue, the surprise itself amplifies the pleasure.
I had to put my coffee down when I read that. My messages are anything but surprising. They arrive every morning, as reliably as the sunrise. Could it be that my very faithfulness is precisely what makes them less visible? Most of us don’t thank the sun for rising. It doesn’t mean we would not miss it.
A friend told me that his daughter recently said, “I feel like I haven’t talked to you in a while.” He realized he hadn’t sent her his usual good-night text in four days. Four days, and she felt the absence, though she had never once mentioned the presence.
Perhaps, then, my messages are noticed after all, and the silence I hear says more about how rarely we tell people what their gestures mean to us than about whether they mean anything. That question, how we receive and why we so seldom acknowledge what comes to us, deserves its own newsletter, and I promise I will come back to it.
Text or voice?
While reading the research, I came across yet another study that ruffled my feathers. In 2021, Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley found that people who reconnected with an old friend by phone felt a significantly stronger bond than those who wrote an email, and the call turned out to be far less awkward than they had feared. Voice, it seems, carries something text cannot.
I believe them, and I don’t. Some of my most cherished relationships are woven out of thousands of small written threads: a photo sent at seven in the morning that reaches a friend in Germany at lunchtime, three lines to a cousin in Paris, a heart sent to someone in a hospital bed who would not have had the strength for a phone call. My whole crew lives on the other side of the ocean. Without the written word, I would have lost many of them years ago.
Maybe both are true. Maybe the daily message keeps the thread from breaking, and the phone calls, which I make just as faithfully, are what strengthen it.
Through their eyes
Another Adlerian idea came back to me as Michael and I talked: the concept of private logic. Which in essence means: we each see and live the world through our own lens. The people I write to may not enjoy writing. They may love me dearly and still not think of a daily message as something one does. They may assume I know how they feel. They may not use a smart phone or be fluent in modern technology!! None of this is an excuse for them; it is simply their world, which is not mine.
I had to admit something else, something that made me laugh at myself a little. I am a hyper-caring person. I am oversized in most things (anyone who has been in a workshop with me can confirm this), and I am oversized in this as well. Most people care at a more ordinary volume. That does not mean they care less. It means they express it differently, and less often, and I have been measuring their love with my own ruler.
When silence comes, the mind rushes in to fill the blanks. What did I do wrong? Are they angry with me? Have they forgotten me? These invented stories are often far more painful than whatever is actually happening on the other side. When someone we were close to disappears completely, without a word, the stories can become unbearable. Ghosting is a subject all its own, and it will have its own newsletter soon as well.
The one who goes first
A family member told me about a mission she gave herself about six years ago. She had lost touch with a group of people who had once been very close friends, some for nearly twenty years. Instead of waiting until it might be too late, she decided to reach out to each of them, one by one, systematically. Some wrote back with joy, as if no time had passed. Some never answered. She is now back in touch with quite a few of them, and despite the non-answer of a few, she has never regretted it.
The day before my conversation with Michael, he had spoken with a young Millennial person who was struggling with the opposite problem: wanting to reconnect with old friends, in a world where everyone is over-connected on social media, and not knowing how to begin.
My own answer to that struggle was learned long ago, when I moved across the ocean at 26. Someone has to go first. More often than not, it will be you. The question is whether you can go first without keeping score.
Here are a few things that help me to this day, and that I offer to you:
- Ask yourself Michael’s question before you hit send. Why am I reaching out to this person? If the answer is love, curiosity or care, send it as a gift, with no strings attached. If the answer is a test, you may want to wait until you feel differently.
- Reach out to someone who would be surprised. The research suggests that the old friend, the former colleague, the cousin you haven’t seen in years will likely appreciate it far more than you imagine.
- Use your voice once in a while. Even if you are a devoted texter like me, an occasional phone call may deepen what the messages maintain.
- Decide in advance what silence will mean. Before you send, remind yourself that no answer is not a verdict on your worth. It may simply be someone else’s private logic at work… or someone’s life getting in the way.
- Notice the stories you tell yourself. When you catch yourself filling in the blanks, ask whether you actually know what is happening, or whether you are writing a novel.
So, would anyone notice?
I still don’t know.
And I am still not sure I want to know.
I suspect some people would notice right away, some would notice later, and some might not notice at all, and that each of those answers would say something about them and their private logic or current life situations rather than my value.
What I do know is that I will write again tomorrow morning. Partly because I love these people. Partly, if I am being fully truthful with you, because a part of me still hopes that one day someone will write first. I have stopped trying to decide which of those reasons is the real one. Perhaps they are both real, and both human.
John Donne wrote it nearly four hundred years ago:
“No man is an island, entire of itself;
every man is a piece of the continent,
a part of the main.”
We need each other. Some of us simply say it more often.
