The Connection Spectrum

Not all relationships are built the same, and not all of them are meant to be.

Following a poll asking what people wanted me to write about next, the winner was Borderline Personality Disorder. I know where I want to take that article, but before I write it, I think there’s another conversation that needs to happen first.

This subject sits at the very heart of BPD and also reflects what I’ve been experiencing lately, both in my personal life and on Substack.

This is a more theoretical piece than a personal one, although it was prompted by a few recent moments.

A surprising mention during a live video by Ana C. M. de Almeida, PhD , followed by a wonderfully kind paragraph on one of Kelly Higgins articles, and then a deeply heartfelt message.

Both incredibly thoughtful, and both genuinely mean a lot to me.

The problem is — I don’t know how to respond.

I don’t want to make that the focus of this article, because the reasons belong in a much bigger conversation about expectation, failure and the fear of letting people down.

Those themes deserve an article of their own.

But they do explain why I often don’t read messages like these straight away.

Sometimes I have to read them in small pieces over several hours.

Sometimes I leave them until the following day.

It’s not because I don’t appreciate them.

Quite the opposite.

The more something means to me, the more difficult it becomes to engage with it.

One thing I always say about mental health disorders is that, regardless of how well someone understands their condition, patterns will still reveal themselves.

You can write expertly about your diagnosis, explain exactly how it affects your daily functioning and describe every symptom in detail, but the disorder will always become visible.

It appears in how you communicate, how you interact, what you avoid, what you return to, and the rhythms that emerge over time.

On Substack, those patterns are just as obvious, if not ever more so, than they are in real life.

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Real Connection

The internet has given us new words for old ideas. We talk about subscribers, followers, audiences and communities as though they describe different things, when most of us are really talking about the same question.

How do people become connected to one another?

It’s a question that becomes more complicated the longer you think about it because connection is one of those things we all recognise but struggle to define.

We know when we feel connected to someone, yet ask ten people what creates that feeling and you’ll probably receive ten different answers.

For some, connection is built on time. Years of shared experiences become the foundation of trust.

For others, time has very little to do with it. We’ve all met people we’ve known for twenty years but never really felt close to, while occasionally meeting someone who, within an hour, seems to understand us better than those we’ve spent decades around.

Some people believe connection comes through vulnerability; the willingness to let another person see parts of yourself that are usually kept hidden.

Others believe it comes through consistency. Not dramatic moments of honesty, but the quiet reliability of someone who keeps turning up, month after month, year after year.

Perhaps they’re all right.

Or perhaps they’re all describing different kinds of connection.

That distinction matters because we often treat connection as though it’s a single achievement.

Once you’ve made it, you’ve somehow arrived.

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In reality, creating a connection and maintaining one appear to be entirely different skills.

Some people have an extraordinary ability to connect with almost anyone. They make conversations feel natural. They ask questions that don’t sound rehearsed.

They listen in a way that makes people feel interesting rather than simply listened to. They leave others feeling understood.

Yet that ability tells us almost nothing about the rest of their lives.

It’s entirely possible to be someone who forms meaningful connections every day while living a remarkably private life.

The ease with which someone connects shouldn’t be mistaken for openness. Some people invite everyone into a conversation but very few into their lives.

Those aren’t contradictions.

They’re boundaries.

Perhaps we’ve confused being approachable with being accessible.

The two aren’t the same.

I suspect that’s one reason the language around online writing often feels inadequate.

When someone subscribes to a newsletter, what exactly are they subscribing to?

Is it friendship? Unlikely.

Conversation? Possibly.

Simple access? Who knows.

But you can be reasonably sure they’re choosing to spend time with someone else’s thoughts.

In a world where attention has become increasingly fragmented, that’s a surprisingly generous act.

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Every subscription is, in a small way, an expression of trust. Trust that whatever appears in their inbox next week will be worth the time they’ve given it.

That trust doesn’t require the writer to know every subscriber personally.

In fact, it simply can’t.

The moment an audience begins to grow, something changes.

Not necessarily in the writer, but in the mathematics.

When you have fifty readers, replying to everyone feels possible. When you have five hundred, it becomes extremely difficult. At fifty thousand, it’s simply impossible.

The desire to connect may remain exactly the same, but the practical ability to maintain individual relationships inevitably diminishes.

Growth introduces a paradox that few people talk about.

The larger your audience becomes, the less personal you can afford to be with each individual within it.

That doesn’t mean the connection becomes less genuine. It simply becomes different.

Writers often worry about losing touch with their audience as they grow, but perhaps that’s the wrong way of looking at it. You don’t lose touch because you care less. You lose touch because one person only has so much attention to give.

Attention is finite.

Time is finite.

Neither expands at the same rate as an audience.

This isn’t unique to writing.

Every form of growth asks us to exchange depth for breadth.

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The small business owner who knew every customer by name eventually manages a team instead.

The teacher who once remembered every student’s story finds herself responsible for hundreds.

Success almost always creates distance from the very thing that made success possible in the first place.

Maybe that’s why maintaining connection feels harder than creating it.

Making a connection is often a moment.

Maintaining one is a process.

And processes are vulnerable to change.

We like to imagine that relationships end because something goes wrong. There is an argument. A betrayal. A disagreement too large to recover from.

More often, they simply evolve into something else.

People’s lives expand in different directions. They become busier. Their priorities shift. The things that once held them together gradually matter less than the things pulling them elsewhere. Nobody decides to disconnect. The connection simply becomes more difficult to sustain.

Perhaps this is where consistency matters most.

Not consistency in the sense of never changing. That would be impossible. We’re supposed to change. Hopefully we’re all different people at fifty than we were at twenty.

The challenge is that growth rarely happens at the same pace or in the same direction.

One person changes quickly.

Another hardly changes at all.

One begins reaching less often.

The other notices and responds accordingly.

Neither intends to let the relationship weaken, yet both quietly adapt to what they perceive the other person wants. Distance becomes reciprocal, even if it wasn’t deliberate.

It’s tempting to interpret that as failure.

I’m not sure it always is.

Maybe we’ve become too attached to the idea that every meaningful connection should last forever.

Some do.

Many don’t.

That doesn’t necessarily diminish what they were while they existed.

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The same may be true of readers.

Some people will subscribe for years. Others will read three essays before moving on. Some will never leave a comment but will quietly read every word you publish.

Others will become familiar names for a season before disappearing without explanation.

We tend to judge those relationships by their duration.

Perhaps we should judge them by their significance instead.

After all, there are books that stay with us for life despite only taking a weekend to read.

There are conversations we remember decades later, while forgetting people we saw every day.

Length and depth have never been reliable companions.

So what is real connection?

Maybe it isn’t measured by closeness.

Maybe it isn’t measured by frequency.

Maybe it isn’t measured by permanence.

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Perhaps connection is simply the extent to which one person leaves a lasting impression on another, regardless of how long they remain in each other’s lives.

If that’s true, then subscribers are more than a number, followers are more than a metric, and community is more than an engagement strategy.

They’re evidence that, for reasons we rarely understand, one person’s thinking has found a place in someone else’s life.

Whether that connection lasts a week or twenty years may not be the most important question.

Perhaps the more interesting question is whether we’re expecting connection to do something it was never designed to do.

Maybe some connections are meant to accompany us for life.

Maybe others are only meant to accompany us while we’re becoming the person who eventually walks on alone.

I don’t know.

But as I’ve got older, I can honestly say I don’t think I’ve become any better at deciding which connections are real…

I still lack understanding of why some connections endure, whilst others simply fade away…

And I’ve no definitive answers as to what either outcome tells us about their value in the first place.

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