Kailey Haynes: Intimate Human Connections

The University of Winchester professors were on strike.

The flyers handed out during the strike.

And during their four week strike, the professors held free lectures related to voice, rhetoric, and human rights. I attended Dr. Carolin Esser-Miles’s lecture on ‘How the Speaker’s Perspective Influences the Way We See the World’. I was the only person to attend, so the lecture became a personal intellectual conversation between the two of us.

Dr. Esser-Miles started by giving several examples of general perspective in our everyday lives: how our sight is more powerful than our hearing and how our association with colors and emotions link with each other. We deepened the conversation, talking about my own experiences with perspective.

I described an old high school friend who influenced me to get heavily involved on campus. I never expressed my gratitude for her unconscious help because our interactions with each other never held any intimate moments.

Dr. Esser-Miles flipped the narrative on me. The professor asked how I would feel if someone like my old friend was vulnerable enough to express her own gratitude for my influence upon her. Naturally, I would feel good about myself.

Dr. Esser-Miles then dug deeper into how I could subconsciously use someone’s perspective to understand their opinions. At the time, I wasn’t sure how to respond. But through our conversation, I gained a better understanding about how vulnerability and perspective builds intimate human connections.

***

Aimee and I are about to tear into a brownie sundae.

One friend I made during my Break Away was a British Computer Science student named Aimee. We found companionship and solidarity as the only two women in our laboratory classes, and for most of the semester, we only interacted in that classroom setting. 

But when my study abroad was abruptly uprooted and the mortality of our time together became evident, Aimee and I went to a local pub and shared burgers, drinks, and an ice cream brownie.

There, she confessed how much I meant to her this semester: a loud, outspoken American wrench in the plans for her first year of university. I laughed at the notion of fulfilling a stereotype, and she explained how she needed someone like me who could say out loud what she was thinking to the “obnoxious boys” in the class.

Her vulnerability opened the floor for me to express the same feeling of comradery and gratitude.

Earlier in the semester, I asked her where she would go if she traveled to the United States. Instead of naming off a popular city like New York or Los Angeles, Aimee spoke highly of San Antonio, Texas. So when she refused to let me pay for my own meal, she said I could return the favor when we meet again in San Antonio.

Because of our vulnerability, Aimee and I were able to share an intimate moment and form a promising friendship—an important idea I carried back to the U.S. a few days later.

*** 

While I was at Winchester, I frequently video chatted with three students who were back at Lander University.

My relationships with these students were still new or dwindling from other priorities. Making time to inform them individually about my week helped keep the connections afloat, but our friendships were able to strengthen and become more notably intimate after I came home.

The first acquaintance turned friend and I had frequent philosophical conversations discussing God and His relationship with us. We skated and danced around the kitchen while contemplating Satan’s jealousy against humans and baked chocolate chip cookies while pondering why God could love such inferior creatures—a sharp departure from the mundane “how was your day?”. We have vastly different religious views, but his passion and articulate responses maintained a dignified conversation that allowed me to absorb and respect his point of view regardless of my preconceptions on the topic.

Another friend and I’s first interactions were quick Starbucks chats. After Aimee and I only had the one intimate moment during our time together, I wanted better for the friends back home. I agreed to an invitation to eat lunch at Grace Street Park, an unorthodox choice for me because the campus held my classes, and the unbearably hot weather was unfavorable, and the jeans I wore would stick to my skin, and the simple idea of all of these inconveniences coming together crawled up my spine like a shiver, a warning. But I agreed.

While we ate on a bench, children played around us. We chatted about our own childhood lives, and she asked me if I missed those days. I did not. We then walked around the trails, taking in the scenery and talking about racial sensitivity and representation in media as polite acquaintances don’t do.

After my intimate moments abroad, I made a conscious effort to rekindle my connection with the third friend. So we have been getting food from Sonic regularly, eating in an empty parking lot at an abandoned grocery store because of the location’s spacious setting. We listened to the Gorillaz play on my phone, ice cream in hand.

He turned up the music and started dancing as a favorite single began blasting through the speakers. It was so rare to see him so happy, I intensely watched his movements—so vulnerable and embarrassing and unapologetic.

After a few songs, I gained the courage to start dancing myself, so we became two dancers in an empty parking lot. It was us and only us there. We danced along for a while.

Would these intimate situations happen without my interactions with Dr. Esser-Miles and Aimee? Sure. But I wouldn’t have been as perceptive of these important intimate moments. Dr. Esser-Miles taught me about perspective and challenged me to use perspective as a way to empathize with others and encourage vulnerability with others. Her lecture proved valuable in my intimate interaction with Aimee and subsequently deepened my value in vulnerable moments after my Break Away to form intimate human connections.

Kailey Haynes is a third year Computer Information Systems student with an emphasis in Software Development and minors in writing and political science. She completed her Break Away at the University of Winchester in Winchester, England during the Spring 2020 semester. Kailey anticipates to graduate in Spring 2022 with plans to venture away from SC in pursuit of a Masters Degree in her field.