I took a Meisner class right after college. Every Tuesday night I’d drive into the industrial part of town along the river to join a group of ten on pretty-close-to-ancient, pulled-from-the-stadium baseball bleacher seats. We met on the first floor of a building that looked like it could still house 19th-century Lowell Mills machinery.

When you inhaled deeply enough, you could smell the years of creation on its walls.

I wasn’t an actress but I was in search of an art — a creative outlet and form of expression. Something to knock me back into the present. Anything to make me feel my feelings. Because our early 20s are hard. And we’re all just a little bit f*cked up, lonely, searching and in need of a wake up from our own routines.

So, I chose to combat the trials, the boredom and the confusion of early adulthood, with a weekly class studying Meisner — an acting method that uses techniques of repetition to help an actor get out of his (or her) own head, with the hopes of encouraging the most natural and honest reaction to their present moment. All while beautifully shifting the importance from the words being spoken to the underlying emotion being felt. Probably a big old paralleled metaphor for what my life needed at the time.

By the end of the first night I was hooked. Terrified and shaking, but hooked and feeling the most alive I’d felt in a long, long time.

I fell in love in that class over the next few months — with the people, with the process, but mostly with our individual, innate ability for deep and almost instantaneous human connection. Our ability to fall in love with anyone we invest in. With anything we sit with, look at and truly see for long enough.

The first night we did an exercise where we sat directly across from a partner. One partner would make an observation and we would repeat their words back to them. Flinging this same sentence back and forth, only allowing it to change if the statement became untrue. The true communicating not in the words, but through the inflection and tone — through shared feeling.

In pairs we took turns stepping up in front of the class so that our classmates could watch the intimate magic of this exercise unfold. And it was magic.

My partner was a male, late 30s with tattoos and a tank top he’d definitely made himself. One of those muscle tees you put on before you hit Planet Fitness. My initial face-value-assessment left me uncomfortable and wishing I’d have been paired with the middle-aged mother of three to my left. But no such luck.

I sat in one of the royal blue classroom chairs placed on a rug that I assumed marked the “stage area”, took a deep breath and let it begin.

I brought my eyes up quickly from my feet to meet his surprisingly soft gaze.

Quick. Like the pulling of a band aid.

Almost immediately, out of his mouth and with the oomph of a kamikaze missile to my unready heart he said, “You are sad.” All the air left my lungs. My fingers tingled. The furthest points on my extremities begged for more oxygen. I think for a moment the blood flow just stopped. The world and my major organs made a quick pact to cease movement.

And just like that, this complete stranger in a cut-off tank top began to bulldoze down a wall I didn’t know I’d built around myself. One no man had ever even climbed.

I struggled to keep eye contact while I repeated the phrase back to him. Whatever “extremely exposed” looks like on a face, I was certain that it was painfully smeared across mine. He repeated it back to me. You are sad. Sure and steady with a tone that didn’t push. He was subtle, simple and loving in his reporting of what he observed to be true.

We served those words around for the good part of 10 minutes before I started to cry. Never breaking eye contact with the man in the muscle tee.

Till this day, I swear there was a moment I felt my heart leave my chest and crawl into his hands in the fetal position. A heart that so desperately needed to be held. I never asked him, but I know he’d felt it too. Because around minute 11, his tears came.

I’d let him in. He’d seen me. Layers beneath the flesh I sat there in.

“I am sad,” I confirmed as if to surrender to our new shared love and intimacy. In that moment I loved him. I loved my heart for leaving me to sit with someone else briefly. Because more often than not we don’t know where to send the things closest to us to heal.

I loved the three words we’d been sharing with each other.

I loved it all.

***

What I learned from my time in that warehouse on the river is that in some capacity we have the power to choose who and what we love. It’s not complicated. Look a stranger in the eyes for long enough, and I guarantee your heart will soften for them. Stare a project or a cause down. Give it your time. There is no doubt that it will steal a part of you. Interests turn to passions when you invest in them. Strangers turn to lovers in an instant when you take the uninterrupted time to truly see them. And to let them see you.

We, as human beings, can love in a true and real instant because this human connection thing is a gift we’ve all been given. And because of this, we never have to be alone or unseen. We don’t have to worry that we’ll never find love again or that we’re possibly unlovable. We don’t have to scream and scratch and claw at passion, because it will just reveal itself. And sometimes in the most unlikely places.

Just remember…when we have nothing else to hold fast to, we are true masters in the art of falling in love. And that will heal us, save us and set us free.