The Back Rows

On the alchemy of presence, warmth, and becoming — how certain parts of us emerge in the right company.

I recently came across a few pieces on Substack from a writer who talks a lot about the psychological mechanisms behind relationships, and about certain people’s “glow” in particular. Some people carry a kind of light that makes the world feel newly legible. I think about this often, and what it is exactly that makes them glow, how their mere presence seems to draw things into focus, how they seem to move effortlessly though life in their own bubble, how your own name can sound a little truer from their mouths, how some parts of you will only emerge for certain people. 

There’s a wordless recognition in such encounters – in the people that look and feel like a light source. Not in a way that forces us to shine, but that shows us a way of looking at the world through a different lens. Their attention isn’t really just observation, but more like discovery. Somehow, you begin to realize that some parts of you are not missing – they’re simply unlit. 

Perception – The Beauty of Being Seen

I refuse to think of identity as stable, as self-contained. Most of who we are exists in potential, awaiting activation. Psychologists call this the “relational self”– the idea that we carry within us many possible configurations of being, each one responsive to the people and contexts that surround us. In some companies, we shrink. In others, we expand. Certain presences act as keys, unlocking aspects of ourselves we hadn’t yet accessed, and probably wouldn’t have on our own or with a different person. 

I had a professor in my final year of college who seemed to carry her own light. When she entered a room, it felt like someone had opened a window. She’d been teaching the same course for a decade, yet still walked into our 5pm class with an energy that revived our end-of-afternoon tired college student faces. She had such passion about the material that she sounded like a fresh graduate who’s ready to take on the world. She was the first person I remember feeling truly “seen” by. Outside of the classroom, I was going through a tough time, and somehow, she seemed to know. She’d check in on me between classes, never intrusively, just with a kind of effortless care, even though she didn’t have to. One afternoon, as I was heading toward the metro, she caught up to me and asked if I’d walk with her while she ran a few errands. We ended up talking for an hour – about nothing and everything. She didn’t want to fix or advise; she just wanted to know me. At that moment, she wasn’t just my professor – she was my friend. We found we shared more than I’d expected: curiosities, small philosophies, even a sense of humor. With her encouragement, I began exploring an area of study I might never have found on my own – one that shifted the direction of my work and revealed something I was, to my surprise, genuinely good at. This chain of events wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t encountered her.

This kind of seeing isn’t new. It’s been written about in many forms, whether in philosophy, psychology, literature… Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote about “the look” – how being seen by another consciousness changes us. For Sartre, the moment you feel another’s gaze, you recognize yourself as a subject in their world –  and paradoxically, that very recognition expands your awareness of self. The look destabilizes, but it also awakens: you become aware of dimensions of yourself that only emerge in relation to another’s perception.

Virginia Woolf often wrote about how love or friendship could act as a mirror that doesn’t merely reflect, but reshapes. In her essays and diaries, she suggests that being truly seen by someone — not for what you perform, but for what is truly beneath – can reorder your sense of self entirely. It’s less about being known than being brought into knowing. The right gaze, if you will, is a kind of invention. Not because it images something that isn’t there, but because it dares to imagine you more completely. 

Perception is the spark. It’s the first ignition of light in the darkened room of selfhood. But spark alone isn’t enough. Seeing can awaken – yet to stay awake, you need more. Attention can warm, but only presence heats. 

Heat – The Alchemy of Being With 

Some relationships – and I’m talking about all sorts of relationships, friendly, professional, romantic or other – act like a kind of emotional climate. It might seem strange to phrase it this way, but haven’t you ever felt the air itself change in someone’s presence? Around certain people, our nervous system seems to exhale. I don’t think it has to do with simply feeling “understood”. It’s being regulated – steadied by another person’s warmth and rhythm. 

In their book A General Theory of Love, psychologists Lewis, Amini, and Lannon called this the “limbic resonance”: the process by which our nervous systems synchronize with those we’re close to. Basically, it’s the biology behind connection: two bodies, two sets of electrical pulses, learning to hum in harmony. When someone offers genuine steadiness – the kind that doesn’t demand you to perform or protect – the body interprets it as safety, and from that safety, the psyche grows. That kind of psychological safety translates beautifully to the idea of intimacy between people – again, whether it’s a friendly rub on your shoulders, or a romantic gesture – where flourishing doesn’t come from scrutiny; it comes from safety. We evolve most easily where we feel least afraid to be seen.

One of my closest friends, who I’d met on her semester abroad in college, was the first presence I consciously realized felt like exhaling after holding my breath too long.  As opposed to another friendship that had just ended, I never felt like I had to explain myself with her. I’ve told her things I could never say to others I’d been friends with for far longer. The small, frail edges of vigilance I usually carried started to dissolve. Looking back on that now, it all made so much sense: the first day of class, I sat next to her. From my first project, she picked up on things we had in common. From that first conversation in a café on a freezing February day in Paris, and endless ones after that, to us working on every single project together in that class and being closer than ever almost three years later now. She listened to me, she saw me, she was the one to get me out of that reclusive state I was in, which I strongly admit today, was never me.

One of the Substack pieces that inspired my exploration of this topic led me to a fascinating short essay titled What Is Love? Neural Annealing in the Presence of an Intentional Object on Qualia Computing. This is where this particular metaphor of heat becomes useful: in metallurgy, when metal is heated to a certain temperature, its inner lattice loosens, allowing it to be reshaped. The essay framed love as a kind of neural annealing: emotional intensity as heat that softens the brain’s rigid patterns, allowing it to reorganize in new, more coherent ways. 

Taken less as a scientific explanation and more as an implementation in our topic, it’s an evident image: certain presences act as forges. Under their warmth, we loosen. Our defenses melt. Then, slowly, we take new forms. Being seen becomes being felt. Energy starts to flow again. Joy passes between people like a current, lighting circuits that had gone dim. Haven’t you ever had people who could literally make you happy by just showing up? I know I have. And that is the glow I mean. It’s not a romanticized description in a book or movie, it’s a real thing. The warmth of another’s attention can spark aliveness – and aliveness, in turn, becomes contagious. We glow differently when we are near those who glow. 

I feel it is the moment in this piece where I tell you: not every source of heat nourishes. Some relationships feel incandescent and leave us brittle – those are fires of a different kind, and not what I mean. The glow I mean is also not infatuation, nor idolization, and especially not invasion. The distinction is crucial, as these are traps (don’t worry, I’ve fallen into those too). The glow I talk about is simple, human, co-aliveness. Two people expanding in tandem, without collapsing into each other. The difference is whether the warmth frees you or consumes you. This makes me think of a quote from an interview with a French singer I love, talking about another singer I love and her friendship with him. She had said one of the most beautiful things I’d ever read about someone:

“He makes you want to share a drink while remaking the world rather than run away from it.” (translated from French)

This really sums it up for me. Heat and warmth provided by a presence is the most beautiful thing existing in the space between two friends, two lovers, two relatives, two anything really. It softens the boundaries that keep us small and lets the inner architecture shift. It leaves us with the essential invitation: to move from being warmed by light to becoming a source of it.

Becoming — Co-Creation of a New Self

The presence of the right people doesn’t just shift how we feel – it can completely alter the terrain of who we can be. You might notice yourself speaking differently, choosing differently, moving though life in a different way. Borrowing kindness and quirks from them. The people who will have a positive effect on those aspects of your life will be set aside like this: the version of you that exists in their presence doesn’t disappear when they leave. It stays, like a new muscle-memory of being. 

“There are things that can’t be found anywhere, but we dream they can be found in other people.” — Twin Peaks

Selfhood, after all, is not a solitary invention. Yes, it requires you to “work on yourself” as we often hear. But a big part of it comes from evolving collaboration with others, consciously or unconsciously. We are each partly written by the people who have known us well. Psychologists sometimes describe the self as a living network of interactions, shaped and reshaped through contact. Every encounter sketches another draft. We grow toward the versions of ourselves that others can believe in. When someone holds an image of us with both faith and clarity – not idealized, but expansive – we start to live into it. 

Again, I do not think of these relationships as ones that overwrite who we are in that sense. I think of them as activation of parts that must emerge. This type of glow we’ve been talking about, the one we feel in their company, is not borrowed light – it should be our own radiance, mirrored back until we learn to recognize it. These people don’t even seek that activation from us, no one has the will or the time to consciously make that effort. They, just like us in this scenario, felt the attraction to something they don’t know the outcome of yet. The cycle of glow is reciprocal, you can be on either end of it. Except both ends are the same: eventually, they glow. 

Tenderness and attention are not just feelings; they are forms of architecture. With every act of seeing, listening, and believing, we build small sanctuaries in one another. And the truth is, most of these people aren’t going to be destinations. Most of them will be passages, and a few will stay forever. However, it is important to love both. That thought has changed the way I see all of this. You must love both. 

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To love is to allow yourself to be reshaped — not out of lack, but out of possibility. There are parts of us that can only come alive in the warmth of another’s presence. And in loving someone that way, we offer them the same gift: a space where their unseen selves can surface and recognize themselves as belonging.

The right presence will never ask “Who have you been?”. It will ask “Who are you becoming, and how can I meet you there?”

And it is in that shared becoming that lies the quiet awe of being human: none of us glows alone. We often hear how misery is contagious, but so is joy. Follow that joy. Follow these people.