The Loneliness of Being a Blue Dot

A few weeks ago, I hosted a retreat for Illumine subscribers, and one of the most beautiful things that came out of it had very little to do with the classes I taught or the crafts I had planned or all the tiny magical details I tucked into the weekend like little love notes.

It was what happened after everyone went home.

The women who came to that retreat have become real friends. They started a group chat, and weeks later, they are still in there talking to one another constantly. I get to sit inside that little thread of connection and watch it bloom in real time, like a wildflower that decided nobody needed to grant it permission before it took over the whole damn yard.

They are checking in with one another, sharing pieces of their everyday lives, and they are already planning a group trip so they can be together again.

Every time I see those messages pop up, I think, this is what women are hungry for.

We are hungry for something deeper than another carefully managed online space where everyone performs the most agreeable version of themselves and then tries to call that performance community. We are hungry for places where we can exhale. We are hungry for circles where we do not have to begin every honest thought by making it softer, smaller, sweeter, or easier to swallow for people who were already committed to misunderstanding us.

Because good and well, women are craving community right now in a way that feels almost cellular.

I have had so many conversations lately with friends who are frustrated and heartbroken by everything happening in the world. Women who are trying to stay informed without letting the news chew through their nervous system like a possum in a feed sack. Women who are trying to make sense of cruelty that keeps showing up with better lighting and louder microphones. Women who are looking around their own hometowns and wondering where in the hell their people are hiding.

No matter where the conversation begins, it keeps circling back to the same ache. They feel alone. They do not know how to find community where they live. They feel surrounded by people, yet unsure who is safe enough to sit beside.

And oh-my-lanta, do I understand that.

All my life, I have lived in a little red town. I am close enough to a blue bubble to remember it exists, but I am still very much a blue dot in a deep red state. And let me tell you, being a blue dot can be a lonely damn thing.

It can feel like standing in a room full of people while holding your truth behind your back. It can feel like measuring your words at the grocery store, at the post office, at the doctor’s office, or at the little hometown restaurant where everybody knows somebody who knows somebody. It can feel like constantly deciding whether today is the day you have the energy to be brave, or whether you would rather get your coffee, smile politely, and go home.

There is a certain type of exhaustion that comes from living somewhere your values are not always reflected back to you. There is grief in it, too, because most of us do not want to spend our lives fighting with strangers beside the tomatoes at the farmers market. We want neighbors. We want friends. We want to sit on porches and drink something cold while we talk about what we’re planting next year and what we’re scared might happen before then. We want ordinary softness. We want belonging that does not require us to abandon ourselves at the door.

But when the world feels unsafe, and when the stakes feel high, and when the people around us may be diametrically opposed to everything we believe about freedom, justice, bodies, power, religion, fascism, patriarchy, and basic human dignity, it becomes very easy to retreat into the safety of our own little bubbles.

And honestly, I do not blame anyone for doing it.

Sometimes the bubble is survival. Sometimes staying quiet is how we get through a family dinner, a school event, a work meeting, or a Tuesday afternoon in a town where every other truck has a sticker on it that makes your whole nervous system want to climb out of your body and hide in a hydrangea bush.

There are times when silence is self-protection. I believe that with my whole chest.

While we are protecting ourselves from the people who might dismiss us, mock us, rage at us, or try to make us smaller, we may also be making it harder for the right people to find us.

That has been the great, inconvenient, beautiful lesson of my life lately. The more honest I become, the easier my people find me.

The more vocal I am about what I believe, the more aligned friendships seem to appear. The more I stop trying to make myself acceptable to people who were never going to choose my full self anyway, the more I find myself surrounded by women who feel like a deep breath. Women I can talk to about all the things. Women who can sit with the truth of the world and the truth of everyday life in the same conversation, without acting like either one is too much to hold.

Last Friday night, I had dinner at a friend’s house, and another mutual friend joined us. We sat on the front porch for hours, talking about everything from politics to our hopes and dreams, from old wounds to current fears, from the things that shaped us to the things we are still trying to become.

And it was so lovely I could have cried.

The beauty of it was not in anything fancy. Nobody had created some elaborate scene with themed plates or thousand-dollar flower arrangements. It was beautiful because it was honest. It was beautiful because the conversation had room to breathe. None of us had to sand down the edges of what we believe just to keep the peace.

That is what so many women are missing.

We do not simply want company. We want witnesses. We want people who can hear the whole sentence without rushing us toward a more convenient version of ourselves. We want places where our joy is not mocked, our grief is not minimized, our anger is not treated like a character flaw, and our hope is not dismissed as foolishness.

We want to be known.

And being known requires some level of visibility.

That is the tender little snag in all of this, isn’t it? Most of us want deeply aligned community, but we are scared to be recognizable enough for that community to find us. We want the right people to somehow know where we are, but we keep our porch lights off because we are afraid the wrong people might see them too.

I get it. Heavens to Betsy, do I get it.

Especially as women, we have been trained to make ourselves less offensive to the room. We learn to read the temperature before we speak. We learn to tuck away the parts of ourselves that might make someone uncomfortable. We learn how to survive by becoming smaller, and then one day we look around and wonder why our relationships feel so thin.

We wonder why the conversations stay on the surface. We wonder why we feel lonely in rooms full of people. We wonder why nobody around us seems to want to talk about the things that keep us awake at night.

But maybe the people who want those conversations are also hiding.

Maybe they are in their own kitchens, scrolling through their phones, wondering if they are the only woman in town who feels like the world has gone to hell in a handbasket while everyone else is acting like the casserole contest is the only thing on the calendar.

Maybe they are waiting for a signal. Maybe your truth is the signal.

I do not know whether it is the cosmic blessings of the universe, manifestation, plain old pattern recognition, or some strange little spell woven from courage and timing, but I do know what I have lived. The more my passion becomes stronger than my fear, the more the right people find me.

When I talk about what I deeply care about, I do not lose community. I clarify it.

Of course, some people leave. Some people roll their eyes. Some people get mad. Some people decide I am too much, too political, too witchy, too feminist, too mouthy, too unwilling to sit down and hush.

But the people who stay, and the people who come closer, are the ones I can build with. They are the ones who feel safe enough to be honest with me because I have been honest first. They are the ones who see my loudness as a lantern instead of a warning sign. They are the ones who do not need me to become more palatable before they decide I am worthy of love, friendship, and a seat at the table.

This is something I see over and over again inside Soft Life Society, too. The safety in that space did not happen by accident. It exists because the room is clear. Women know what kind of circle they are stepping into. They know we are aligned on the big things, which means they can soften enough to talk about the tender things.

When women know they are not going to have to defend their humanity before they share their heart, something opens. When they know they are not going to have to debate whether patriarchy exists, whether fascism is dangerous, whether their bodies belong to them, whether rest is allowed, whether their intuition is real, or whether their anger has a place, they can get on with the actual work of becoming.

They can tell the truth faster.

They can heal in community instead of trying to stitch themselves back together alone in the dark.

And that kind of alignment did not happen because I kept myself vague enough to offend no one. It happened because I have been very clear about who I am, what I believe, and what I am building.

That clarity has cost me some people. Of course it has. But it has also brought me the deepest connections of my life.

There is a strange freedom in realizing that being disliked by the wrong people is often the doorway to being deeply loved by the right ones.

And I think that may be one of the most important things women can remember right now.

They cannot recognize you if you are performing neutrality. They cannot hear you if you are constantly swallowing the sentence before it leaves your mouth. They cannot gather around your porch light if you never turn the damn thing on.

Now, I am not saying we owe our truth to every room. We do not have to turn our lives into a public referendum. We do not have to argue with every uncle, educate every stranger, or burn ourselves out trying to prove our humanity to people who are committed to pretending they cannot see it.

Discernment is holy. Safety is sacred. Being known is sacred, too.

Somewhere between hiding from everyone and handing our nervous system to the loudest fool in town, there is a middle place where we begin to let ourselves become visible in ways that feel brave and true.

Maybe it begins with one honest post.
Maybe it begins with inviting the friend who feels safe to dinner.
Maybe it begins with saying the thing out loud even when your voice shakes a little.

Maybe it begins with joining the group, volunteering on the political campaign, taking the class, going to the retreat, starting the group chat, asking the woman you admire if she wants to grab coffee, or finally admitting that you are tired of pretending you do not need people.

Maybe it begins with lighting one small porch lamp in the blue-black dark and trusting that someone out there is looking for the glow.

I believe we are looking across towns, timelines, comments sections, farmers markets, bookstores, garden centers, retreats, dinner tables, and front porches, trying to spot the women who feel like shelter.

I believe we are tired of the loneliness that comes from being surrounded by people but not truly seen. I believe we are tired of making ourselves more digestible for a culture that has benefited from our isolation for far too long. I believe community is one of the ways we survive what is happening now, and I believe the patriarchy knows good and well that women who find each other become much harder to control.

Real community is not some shiny internet slogan you slap on a tote bag and sell for $28. It is the kind of belonging that grows slowly because somebody was brave enough to tell the truth first. It is the friend who checks on you after the hard conversation. It is the group chat still blooming weeks after the retreat ends. It is the front porch where grief and possibility can sit side by side without anyone trying to tidy them up. It is the woman across town who sees your little light and finally realizes she has not been alone after all.

And that is what I keep coming back to.

Being a blue dot can be lonely. It can feel like standing in a dark field with your little lantern, wondering if anyone else is out there. But sometimes, when enough of us are brave enough to glow, we stop looking so isolated.

And maybe that is how we find our way forward.

One honest conversation at a time. One porch light at a time. One woman brave enough to become recognizable, so another woman can finally look up and say, “There you are. I was looking for you.”