Being relatable

They say the first rule of writing a main character for a story is to not make them likeable, perfect, or put together. Their struggles and problems need to feel real, lived in, their personality and characteristics something we can see ourselves in, that we recognize.

In one word, they should feel relatable.

All story characters have a deep- seated desire or need for love, validation, freedom; or on the opposite spectrum have fears, guilts or regrets. As we spend time with them, we recognize those core motivations and needs. We might abhor that Gi-hub steals money from his mother in the opening scenes of Squid Games, but we relate to his instinct to protect Oh II -nam's dignity by lending him a jacket when he soils himself. We might hate how Kendall Roy treats his wife and kids in Succession, but we understand his need to be his father's number 1 boy, to be finally validated by him. We have all wanted that in our lives and we recognize in characters the need to be needed, wanted, loved, cared for. Despite having no commonality with the life of a billionaire in New York or a debt-ridden, unemployed man in S. Korea, we find ourselves drawn to these base emotions.

Life works very similar to stories.

The more time you spend with someone, the more you relate to them. We grow up with our school friend, spend hours hanging out with our college friends on trips and fests, have lunch with the same colleagues for years. The sheer amount of time we spend together bonds us and molds us into each other. The irritating teammate, the beautiful sceneries, the crushes - all these become topics of conversation, something that connects us to them. And when we part ways, we realize... there is nothing to talk about.

What do we and our college friend 5000 kms away have in common, now that our entire day, and life looks different? What can we relate to anymore, except the good old days that once were and will no longer be, or more depressingly, the miseries of today?

Perhaps what bonds us is not the common memories we created, but the collective feeling that shared experience evoked. The laughter in a moment when a joke cracked is deeper than that - it's safety, it's relief, it's the carefree aura it creates. That feeling of trusting a group of people, of belonging, of love, that is the bonding we experience. What was laughed about in the moment is almost irrelevant - unless it's someone falling, that will always be funny. Come on, I'm human ;)

Drifting away from people we once knew closely is a natural phenomenon. That, however, does not mean we cannot create new bonds or the ones we do create are inherently lesser because we haven't spent as much time growing up. We continue to grow in life and a lot of times, the people you are drawn to are not the ones closest to you or the ones you have most in common with. It could be that someone you just never happened to talk to but liked that they were not afraid of being judged, or stood up for something they believed in, or went out of their way to help out someone, and unlike in your growing years, you CAN reach out to them. You are not beholden to people who are around you out of sheer circumstance. The beauty of adulthood is that you can see parts of yourself in people who overall are nothing like you.

The core emotions of fear, of pain, loss, curiosity are something we all feel and will continue to feel whether we're 20 or 60, and as time goes by, we can just find more nuance to these emotions and find something to connect over.

We live in isolated worlds where 'finding your tribe' is almost impossible to achieve. Our friends might be across the world, our family in another city, our co- workers in another job. Finding a tribe of people who would always be around, with free time on their hands and matching schedules gets harder day by day. What is easier is finding moments, parts of people who you resonate with. Our heart has more capacity than we give it credit for. When we connect to someone's core, the conversation never goes stale long after our surface level commonalities disappear. The relatability we need goes much beyond our lifestyle choices, age, or activities in common.

That also means that we can reconnect with people who we were once close to and eventually lost touch with. We don't need to have the same life we always did to rediscover the connection. The thing with distance is that it gives each of us an opportunity to grow into different people with our own unique experiences. Getting to know them again can be beautiful because we can see the transition from them as a child to an adult, even if that adult was partly formed without our influence. We can see how similar they are to their former themselves, or even how dissimilar. We can see how much they continue to care about their parents like they did, or how their voice no longer shakes when placing an order at a fancy restaurant. It's knowing someone all over again while still retaining the level of inherent connection, that can feel really fulfilling.

In that process, it's also discovering new dimensions to ourselves we never knew existed.