interiority as a map of desire and interest
we all hold an internal shape that reflects our innermost desires and curiosities. a landscape formed by childhood obsessions, books that rewired our brains, fears we’re still working through. this inner architecture doesn’t always show. we project to the world a simplified facade. if you imagine yourself a house, our foyer is the first space that newcomers encounter: our job title, fashion sense, opinions about the city. these impressions aren’t necessarily wrong, but they are incomplete. like compressing a 3D object into 1D, a triangle, circle, and square all look like a line - complexity gets lost upon compression.
conversations are entryways into another person.
summer in the city is a whirlwind of brushing shoulders with people, at parties, galleries, and rooftops. inevitably you bump into familiar strangers who you immediately connect with, those that you develop almost a platonic friend crush on. you get the sense that, given the right conditions, this could be someone you’d become good friends.
but sparks fade fizzle fast. what matters more is: how do you move past the entryway?
the first conversation is like being invited into someone’s home for the first time. you’re lingering by the door, unsure whether to take off your shoes. most people never get past this point.
they talk about the weather. their job. the subway delays. it’s safe—polite treading water. we can consider this foyer talk: lowest-common-denominator small talk. no one gets wet. no one goes deep.
but sometimes, with the right question, something shifts. you notice their eyes light up when they talk about their latest pottery class, or they soften upon mention of their parents. you hit a core value, a dream, a fear. you’re invited into someone’s interior. this is the living room of conversation: where values live, opinions unfold, and quirks start to show. my favorite substack calls these conversational affordances, which require saying something a little bit intimate. when you each bring your full shape and gently feel out the contours of the other,
i picture myself like an archaeologist in these moments. not digging to expose, but brushing away dust gently, reverently. what’s the common ground? more interestingly: where do our worlds misalign?
a great way to know someone is to get into their rabbithole.
here’s where the magic happens.
if a conversation with a budding friend is like a house party—buttoned-up, a bit performative—then conversation with a close friend is like crashing on their couch unannounced. you show up messy, cracked open by your day or your month or that one heavy thing you haven’t said out loud yet. they know your language. you speak in shorthand.
these are the conversations i live for—the ones where i come alive. it’s at this point there’s no distance between interiority and exteriority, as externalization begins to shape your own interior.
some people make you feel like you’re breathing cleaner air just by being near them. their presence clarifies you, because they’re fully themselves and they model what it looks like to have integrated edges. they elegantly move through the world with a vivid interior and a language that matches.
maps of interiority
my favorite moments in the city have been attending a friend’s performance, an event they host, a book reading. artists are characters who are deeply individualistic with a rich interiority that dribbles onto a canvas. these moments of celebrating their art are shortcuts into their internal wiring.
the beautiful part about creation, about externalizing, is that you are sending out maps of your interiority that others can easily decipher.
at a photo gallery i recently held with a friend, we asked our friends to share pieces related to their identity. something i uniquely love about photography is how it reveals the unique way you see the world. how you notice edges and lines in buildings, or faint expressions in passersby. how i always fixate on the elderly during photowalks—a subconscious fear of aging.
it became a moment to walk around all of our inner thoughts. portals into each other’s minds. the way we frame what we see, what we find worth preserving—these choices reveal the architecture of our attention, the particular way we’re moved by the world.
one exhibit showed a friend’s travels during a period of unemployment—not typical vacation shots, but quiet moments of uncertainty and discovery. another depicted her visit back to vietnam, capturing the weight of returning to a place that shaped you but no longer quite fits. another shared reflections on growing up korean-american through subtle moments of existing between worlds.
each photo was a portal into someone’s interior, a reflection of not just what they saw, but how they chose to frame it, what they found worth preserving. walking through the space felt like moving through different ways of seeing, different maps of desire and curiosity.
the necessity of others
as precious as our own interiority is, it’s equally important to shape it with others.
only by externalization, by entering into social relationships, can we develop the interiority of our own person. i remind myself of this during my most introverted moments, when i’m battling some false self-truth and want to spin cycles in my room to figure it out. it’s comfortable to sit within your own feelings, easier to construct your own self-truths and spin a narrative. but you need thought partners, attuned to your prickly edges and soft spots, to help mold you and pull you out of a rut.
thankfully there are friends who pull you out of the mess interiority can become. a conversation with yourself is affirming and comforting, but it also limits how vast the field you can traverse. we need other people’s maps to understand the full territory of human experience.
Still, I falter sometimes. I catch myself posturing—slipping into my “pleasant” self to charm or keep equilibrium. A mask I wear out of habit, not malice. But the best conversations—the real ones—happen when both people show up whole. my favorite substack notes that we need conversational affordances, which require saying something a little bit intimate. When you each bring your full shape and gently feel out the contours of the other.
Here’s where the magic happens.
If a conversation with a budding friend is like a house party—buttoned-up, a bit performative—then conversation with a close friend is like crashing on their couch unannounced. You show up messy, cracked open by your day or your month or that one Heavy Thing you haven’t said out loud yet. They know your language. You speak in shorthand.
These are the conversations I live for—the ones where I come alive. it’s at this point there’s no distance between interiority and exteriority, as externalization begins to shape your own interior.
“Some people make you feel like you’re breathing cleaner air just by being near them. Their presence clarifies you, because they’re fully themselves and they model what it looks like to have integrated edges. They elegantly move through the world with a vivid interior and a language that matches.”
my favorite moments in the city have been attending a friend’s performance, or a event they host, or a book reading. artists are characters who are deeply individualistic and a very rich interiority that dribbles onto a canvas. and these moments of celebrating their art are shortcuts into their internal wiring.
the beautiful part about creation, about externalizing, is that you are sending out maps of your interiority that others can easily decipher.
at a photo gallery i recently held with a friend, we asked our friends to share some pieces related to their identity. something i uniquely love about photography is how it shares the unique way that i see the world. how i notice edges and lines in buildings, or faint expressions in passerby. or how i always fixate on the elderly on photowalks, a subconscious fear of ageing.
it became a cool moment to walk around all of our inner thoughts. portals into each other’s minds. you literally step into a character’s world, imbue their worst fears and idle observations. it’s a meaningful way of perspective, to see lens by which they observe things
one exhibit showed a friend’s travels around the room during a period of interim in employment; another depicted her visit back to Vietnam; another sharing reflections on growing up Korean-American. each photo was a portal into someone’s interior, a reflection of not just what they saw, but how they chose to frame it, what they found worth preserving.
as precious as our own interiority is, it’s equally important to shape it with others. only by externalization, by entering into social relationships, can we develop the interiority of our own person. remind yourself of this, in your most introverted moments, when you’re battling some false self truth about myself and i want to spin cycles in my room to figure it out. it’s comfortable to sit within your own feelings, easier to construct your own self-truths and spin a narrative. but you need thought partners, attuned to your prickly edges and soft spots, to help mold you and pull you out of a rut.
thankfully there are friends who pull you out of the mess interiority can become. a conversation with yourself is very affirming and comfortinh but it also limits how vast it is the field u transverse.
the first rooms one may enter, maybe hidden under the bed in your bedroom or somewhere in the attic or even the top shelf of the bathroom. this inner landscape is built from your childhood obsessions, the books that rewired your brain, the fears you’re still working through, the dreams you’re almost embarrassed to admit.
what we first project to the world is our facade, and these are the most salient features people will lump you into. picture these as the outside rooms, the foyer and entrances. a projection is a lossy image, taking the complex multidimensionality of uor interior: such as, “i have a deep rooted curiosity to try new things because of an whimsy for the world” and flattens it into easy labels: “i started pottery!”
the problem is that multiple different interiors, when flattened, can look like the same exterior label. when put into 1D, a circle, square, and triangle could all appear as a line. how do show your true self and discover another’s?
based on your race/profession/fashoin sense one may clock you as an academic, or a yuppie, or a diy-er.
to be in a city is to brush shoulders with a myriad of interesting folks at parties and friends’ parties and galleries. inevitabily you will find people who you feel that mild spark, squish, as you will, where you’re seized with the feeling that you could become friends.
here’s what i’ve learned: that spark means nothing if you don’t know how to move past the entryway.
any time i meet someone for the first time, there is a mix of anticipation and anxiety that almost likens to a first date. visually i imagine it like being invited to their house for the first time - you see the first conversation involves idling at their entryway, looking for the right place to enter within.
most people never leave the entrance. they exchange pleasantries about the weather, complain about the subway, ask what you do for work. it’s conversational treading water—safe, but it gets you nowhere. i call this foyer talk: the lowest common denominator of topics that anyone can quickly dip their toes in, if the water were freezing and you didn”t want to stay too long.
when you enter someone’s interiority, do so with grace and love. take your shoes off before you come in, keep in check the biases and baggage you may bring with you. tiptoe, tenderly. picture these as living room conversations - the opinions and interests that exist at our underying layer.
i picture myself an archaeologist when i approach these conversations. what is our common ground? maybe more interestingly, where do our realities misalign?
there’s a tension here, to playing this probing role. conversations are best when both parties are authentic. i confess, there are moments where i slip into my fake voice and the conversation can go on auto-pilot. or even to get to an equilibirum with a stranger, i will posture, ever slightly, to pull out the annie that’s most endearing to them.
but here’s the thing: good conversations, with authentic folks with a grasp of their interior shape, are truly generative. in these scenarios, both parties are united in their discovery having identified some exciting, amorphous common ground. delicate tools at hand,
in conversations have dooorknobs, the artful dance of giving and taking in a conversation create affordances, like stairs and tables and doorknobs.
if a conversation with a burgeoning friend is like a buttoned up house party, one with a close friend is like crashing at a friend’s place on short notice. by now you’ve put your guards down and can come as you are: messy, bedraggled, still fuming from the 12092 things that went wrong in your day. or maybe, the one very Heavy Thing that’s been your burden all month. you are attuned to each other’ quirks, to the language by which you construct the world, the characters in your life.
this scratches the idea of bedroom talk on fears, dreams, deep stuff.
during contact points with the friends who get me, i come alive.
rare entry ways are provided by people wh are artists and share their internal state of thinking. through photography, dance, music. so where do we find these people who magically make us come alive? counterintuitively it reuires a better sense of self. contrary to the name, to develop one’s interiority does do best in tandem with others. the right thought partners sharpen you, hold a mirror to your shape and illuminate it into being.
entryways dont have to be conversations - it can manifest through art. perhaps this is why a performance, art exhibition, can move us so, even if we’re not physically in proximate. going to a friend’s performance is the greatest joy - you shortcut into their inner sensibilities far more than a conversation can get you.
this is something i remind myself during my most introverted moments, when im battling some false self truth about myself and i want to spin cycles in my room to figure it out. thankfully there are friends who pull you out of the mess interiority can become. a conversation with yourself is very affirming and comfortin but it also limits how vast it is the field u transverse.
perhaps my favorite thing about well-written novels is how they’re portals into someones interiority. you literally step into a character’s world, imbue their worst fears and idle observations. it’s a meaningful way of perspective, to see lens by which they observe things. authors like victoria woolf, dostevesky, proust, so beloved for this superpower: switching the reader’s place with the character. a good conversation is the closest real life way of tapping into this.
there are many ways i could hold my friendship graph to the light and scrutinize the way that mutuals connect, the hobbies and values and common interests and flavors of activities that hold us together. but at the end of the day, friendship boils down to two things: good humor, and a good heart.
questions to answer: how to chat with a new friend this is a conversation about authenticity.