I keep bees. Out behind the house, in Indiana, where the light goes gold around seven in the evening and the whole yard hums.
Here is something beekeepers know that most people don't. Take one healthy honeybee out of the hive, give her food, give her water, give her warmth, and she will still be dead in about a day. Nothing attacked her. Nothing went wrong with her body. She died of being alone. A bee is not really an individual. She is a piece of something larger, and separated from it, she stops working.
I think about that a lot now.
In Staying Strong in Unsteady Times, there's a woman named Carmen who says something I have heard, in different words, from hundreds of people over decades of counseling work. She says, "I feel like I'm trying to hold up a building by myself."
Her friend Miguel noticed the flip side. On days when he really connected with certain people, everything else worked better. The news was the same. The problems were the same. He wasn't. He said, "I don't think we're supposed to do this alone."
He's right, and there's science underneath it.
Most of us learned exactly one stress response: fight or flight. Threat comes, you swing or you run. That's real, but it's incomplete, and part of why it's incomplete is that for a long stretch of the twentieth century the stress studies were done mostly on males.
In 2000, a psychologist named Shelley Taylor and her colleagues named a second response. They called it tend-and-befriend. Under threat, humans also reach. We gather the vulnerable close, and we seek out our people. It isn't a softer, lesser version of courage. It's a distinct survival strategy, and across human history it has probably saved more of us than fighting ever did.
Which means the impulse you keep talking yourself out of is the healthy one.
You know the impulse. It's ten at night, your chest is tight, and you think of someone you could call. And then you think: they're busy, it's late, I should be able to handle this, I don't want to be a burden. So you scroll instead. You take in more of the thing that hurt you, alone, in the dark.
I have watched that pattern break people who were not fragile. Strong people. Capable people. The ones everybody else leans on.
This is why I say in the book that community isn't a luxury. It's a biological necessity for sustainable resilience. Not a nice-to-have after you've handled your business. The actual mechanism by which humans survive long trouble.
I was in the room in 1971 when Jesse Jackson founded PUSH. What I remember is not the speeches. It's the ordinary fact of a lot of people deciding to be in the same room on purpose, week after week. That is what lasted.
So here's the small thing, and small is fine.
Pick one person. Not a network, not a group, not a movement. One. Contact them this week without a reason. No agenda, no crisis, no favor to ask. Just: I was thinking about you, how are you actually doing.
You are not a bee. But you are not built for the empty jar either.
If you want the fuller framework, including what "enough" connection actually looks like when you're depleted, that's what the book is for. Read the first chapter free, and see if it sounds like your life.
For more content like this, get Staying Strong in Unsteady Times on Amazon.