What We Owe Each Other

There is a moment I keep returning to.

I won't tell you where it happened or who it involved. That's the point, actually - the specifics aren't mine to share, and sharing them would undermine the very thing I'm trying to say. What I will tell you is that I watched someone navigate a public moment with extraordinary grace, and I watched other people treat that grace as an invitation to take more. As though the willingness to be present was the same as consent to be consumed.

It stayed with me the way things do when they're not just witnessed but recognized.

Somewhere along the way we started confusing access with connection. We began believing that briefly witnessing someone meant we were owed a piece of them afterward - a photo, a video, something tangible we could replay later as evidence the encounter happened at all. Proof. That's what it becomes. Not a memory but a document. Not a moment but content.

And I understand the impulse. I do. There's something in us that wants to hold onto what moves us. But there's a difference between holding something and extracting it. Between being changed by an encounter and flattening it into something you can post before you've even fully felt it.

I wrote about this without knowing I was writing about it.

There's a scene in Must I Go Bound that I didn't fully understand until after it was finished. Jude isn't angry in it. He isn't issuing demands or drawing hard lines. He's simply asking - quietly, without performance - to still be treated like a person while existing inside a life that constantly tries to turn people into spectacle. It's one of the most human moments in the book, and it cost him nothing to ask it. What it revealed was everything about the people around him.

That scene came from somewhere real. Most things do, even when you can't name the source while you're writing it. You follow a frequency down past where the words are and you find something that was already true before the story gave it shape.

What I keep thinking about is this: the people who move us - who make things, who stand on stages, who put work into the world at great personal cost - they are still people. The work doesn't belong to them anymore once it's released. But they do. They still belong to themselves. And every time you point a camera at someone who has quietly asked you not to, every time you treat a human moment as raw material for your feed, you are making a choice about who you are.

Not who they are. Who you are.

Jude asks a simple question in that scene, even if he never quite says it aloud: what kind of person do you choose to be when someone asks you to respect their humanity?

There's another side to this that doesn't get talked about enough. It isn't just about taking. It's about the orientation you bring into the room. Some people arrive asking - consciously or not - what can this give me. What story, what content, what proximity. And some people arrive with something in their hands. Not to trade. Not for recognition. Just because they wanted to give something back to someone whose work had given them something real.

I know which one I'd rather be. I know which one I've tried to be. And I know how it feels to watch a genuine exchange get swallowed by the noise of people who couldn't wait five minutes before turning it into a post.

Because that's the truth of it - the posting isn't even really about the person they just met. It's about the strangers watching. The validation waiting on the other side of the upload. The comments that confirm it happened. The moment stops being about connection the second you're already composing the caption in your head. You weren't present. You were performing presence for people who weren't even there.

I recently had a moment that mattered. A moment I will carry for the rest of my life. You will never see it on my feed. You will never see a photo, a video, a caption composed five minutes after. That moment belongs to me and to the person I shared it with, and that privacy isn't an accident - it's a choice. It's the only way I know how to honor something real.

The moment deserved more than that. Most moments do.

I don't think the answer is complicated. I think we just have to be willing to sit with the discomfort of wanting something and choosing not to take it anyway.

That's the whole thing, really. That's all it ever was.

— SL