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It happened like most things happen these days: on the internet.
During a typical day of surfing, Katya had ended up at the page of the Landmark Forum.
“Specifically designed to bring about positive and permanent shifts in the quality of your life—in just three days,” it read. “These shifts are the direct cause for a new and unique kind of freedom and power.”
Katya wasn't superstitious, but she felt there was a reason she'd stumbled on that page. That afternoon, she decided to change her life.
So there she was, a couple of days later, sitting in a crowded but comfortable room.
“Do you want to live your life with integrity?” a speaker asked before launching into a speech about the importance of honesty and accountability.
When it came time to share with the crowd, the usually reserved Katya found herself rising. From the podium, she looked around at the hundred or so faces in the room and heard her voice through the speakers, louder than she'd heard herself in a long time.
“I have an area in my life where I am not being authentic,” she said. “I have a secret that I've been hiding from my family.”
“Why are you hiding it?” the moderator asked.
“I'm lying because afraid of being judged,” she responded. “I told them I was cocktail waitressing, but I'm an exotic dancer.”
“You don't know for sure what they'll think about it until you tell them,” the moderator responded. “People could surprise you when you tell them things. They could already know, too. Why don't you tell them?”
“I don't know.”
“Are you OK with what you're doing?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Do you feel guilty?”
“No.”
“Do you want to have integrity and be authentic?”
“Yes.”
“However they react, that is just something that's happening—you can make it mean whatever you want, but its really only how them reacting. It doesn't really mean anything, do you understand? I am now going to challenge you to tell them. Tell them at the next break.”
“Can I wait until Sunday?” Katya asked, not wanting to compromise that weekend's earnings.
“You came up here concerned about your life. Tell them.”
Katya reluctantly agreed. Afterward when she got off the podium, people came up to her to congratulate her on her strength. Some told them they were also dancers or had been dancers at some point in their lives. Some told her of a loved one who was a dancer. Some told her she was courageous. Some told her that she was beautiful and it was good for her to use her beauty while she had it.
Katya felt empowered—she had never felt so much support from so many people.
That night, my friend Natalie and I were catching up over drinks. It was just past dinner time and before the late night rush at The Blvd, and the soft candlelight glowed around us, giving our table an intimate coziness despite the majesty of the room.
“We stopped talking,” Natalie told me when I broached the topic of her most recent love interest. They’d been seeing each other for almost a year—in the sporadic manner that busy people have of conducting relationships. But still, a year was a fairly long time to be so nonchalant about ending things.
“Are you OK?” I asked her.
“It was really organic,” she said, waving her hand. “We just got involved in several other projects and began spending less and less time with one another and eventually, it just faded and went away.”
“So, what? That’s it? You just stop talking?” I asked. I couldn't believe it. “How do you do that? How do you not go crazy poring over unanswered IMs, e-mails or texts, wondering where he went?”
“There were disconnects on both sides,” she replied, taking a sip of her Gewürzt. “I think the silence is made less dramatic by the high-speed passage of time. We live online so much now—we work there, we meet with friends there, we love there—and in a way, I think we've started to internalize that speed.”
Natalie, like the man she was dating, is a blogger. Whereas much of the rest of the world still runs on standard time, Natalie runs on what she calls Internet Time, an accelerated version of life where a minute is an hour, and an hour is a couple of days.
“So not talking to him now that it’s been a few weeks is almost like not having seen him in ten years?” I asked her, taking a sip of my coffee. Natalie nodded.
“Or
