The coffee shop hums with its usual afternoon frequencies—the espresso machine's asthmatic wheeze, the soft percussion of laptop keys, the particular silence that lives between strangers who've chosen to be alone together. A colleague sits across from me, stirring her latte in slow circles that have nothing to do with mixing and everything to do with not looking up.
"How are you?" I ask.
"Good," she says. The word lands between us like a coin tossed into a fountain—shiny, reflexive, meaningless.
"Why?"
The stirring stops. Her eyes lift, and there it is—that particular flicker I've learned to recognize, the moment when someone's comfortable autopilot encounters unexpected turbulence. The silence stretches. Three seconds. Five. Long enough for us both to notice that "good" had been a door she'd hoped I wouldn't try to open.
"I... actually don't know," she finally says. And something in her shoulders releases, as if the admission itself was the weight she'd been carrying.
I've been thinking about solidity lately. Not the physical kind—not bones and muscle and the architecture of standing upright. I mean something closer to what the Greeks might have called sophrosyne, that untranslatable quality of being sound in one's own mind, of occupying oneself completely. The rare experience of encountering someone who seems to be all the way there.
You know these people when you meet them. Not because they announce themselves—solidity never advertises. But because something in your nervous system relaxes in their presence, the way a child's grip loosens when they realize the adult holding them won't let go. There's no performance to decode, no subtext to excavate, no gap between what they say and what they mean that requires your constant translation.
I've written before about the friend who forgot how to nod—about becoming the kind of person who asks uncomfortable questions instead of offering comfortable agreements. What I didn't explore then was the other side of that coin: why some people become magnets for confession, why strangers on airplanes share their divorce proceedings, why colleagues say things like "I don't know why I'm telling you this."
They tell you because you're solid. Because something in your presence creates permission for their own truth to surface.
Here's what I've noticed about myself, pieced together from the feedback that accumulates like sediment over years of conversations: people find me easy to talk to. Not in the superficial sense—not the social lubricant of agreeableness that makes interactions slide past without friction. Something different. Something that makes them say things they hadn't planned to say, admit feelings they hadn't meant to name.
For a long time, I didn't understand this. I'm not particularly warm in the way warmth is typically performed. I don't nod enthusiastically or mirror body language with practiced precision. I ask questions that make people uncomfortable. I let silences breathe when others rush to fill them. I've been the jerk more often than the liar, choosing directness over diplomacy when the two refuse to share a room.
But maybe that's exactly why. Maybe solidity isn't about making people comfortable—it's about making discomfort feel safe enough to enter.
There's a particular magic trick I've developed, though "developed" suggests more intention than the truth allows. It happens in those moments when someone offers the social script—"I'm fine," "things are good," "can't complain"—and instead of accepting the token, I ask the simplest possible follow-up:
"Why?"
Or sometimes: "What does 'fine' feel like today?"
Or even just: "Tell me more about that."
Watch what happens. The script crumbles. The performance stutters. And in that gap—that beautiful, awkward, necessary gap—something real has space to emerge. Not always. Some people double down on their defenses, and that's information too. But often enough to matter, the simple act of taking their words seriously, of treating their throwaway answer as worthy of examination, creates a kind of breach in the social contract through which authenticity can slip.
This connects to something I explored in silence being golden—the idea that most of us are walking around with stones in our shoes, convinced this is just how feet feel. The solid person doesn't remove the stone for you. They simply make it possible for you to notice it's there, to acknowledge its presence, to perhaps finally reach down and tend to what hurts.
A different meeting. Different colleague. The quarterly review where Daniel presented his team's roadmap with slides so polished they could have been minted.
Someone from product asked a question—nothing sharp, just curious. "What made you prioritize the authentication work over the performance fixes?"
I watched Daniel's smile stay exactly where it was while something behind his eyes left the room. His answer arrived in a complete paragraph, pre-formed, as if he'd pulled it from a drawer labeled "responses to mild inquiry." Words about strategic alignment and stakeholder input and cross-functional dependencies. The room nodded. The slides advanced.
But I noticed the engineer in the corner—Elena, I think—glance at her laptop and stay there. Noticed how the product manager's follow-up question died somewhere between thought and speech. Noticed the particular quality of attention that isn't attention at all, just the appearance of it held in place by professional courtesy.
The roadmap was fine. The strategy was probably fine. But something in that room had quietly closed, like a window painted shut so gradually nobody remembered it ever opened. Whatever genuine thinking might have happened—the useful friction of real questions meeting real uncertainty—had been replaced by the smooth, frictionless exchange of people performing a meeting about a roadmap rather than actually having one.
Daniel wasn't lying. He was just... not quite there. Answering from somewhere adjacent to himself. And everyone felt it, even if no one would name it. By the time we filed out, I couldn't have told you what his team actually believed in, what worried them, what they were betting on. Only what the slides said. Only the surface of things.
There's a species of fake solidity worth naming, because it wears convincing costumes.
I've met people who project warmth so consistently it took months to notice the warmth never varied—never cooled when something bothered them, never heated when something excited them. The temperature was comfortable but artificial, like a thermostat set to a single number regardless of what the room actually needed.
I've met others whose confidence seemed unshakeable until you asked a genuinely curious question—not challenging, just curious—and watched the whole structure wobble. Their solidity was rigidity in disguise, maintained by avoiding anything that might require actual contact with uncertainty.
The tell, I've found, is how people respond to simple questions. Solid people engage with genuine inquiry the way good soil receives seeds—there's somewhere for the question to go, something for it to grow in. Performed solidity deflects or dissolves. Ask "why?" and you get rhetoric instead of reflection, explanation instead of exploration.
How does one become more solid? I'm suspicious of anyone who offers a method, because solidity isn't a technique. It's what remains when you stop running from the parts of yourself you've disowned.
But I can tell you what I've noticed in my own stumbling toward something resembling wholeness:
It starts with being willing to bore yourself with your own truth. To say "I'm anxious" instead of "I'm busy." To admit "I don't know" instead of performing certainty. To let the gap between who you are and who you wish you were exist in plain sight, rather than constructing elaborate scaffolding to hide it.
I've written about small talk becoming great connection when approached with genuine curiosity rather than social obligation. The same principle applies internally. You can make small talk with yourself forever—surface-level self-narratives that sound good but don't touch anything real—or you can start asking yourself the same uncomfortable questions you might ask others.
Why am I fine? What does fine actually mean in my body right now? What am I carefully not thinking about while I insist everything is good?
The gift of solidity, when you begin to cultivate it, is that it changes what conversations become possible. Not just with others—though yes, people do start telling you things they hadn't planned to say, do start arriving at your door already half-opened to their own truths. But also with yourself.
When you're not spending energy on fragmentation, you have more available for attention. When you're not monitoring which version of yourself is appropriate for this moment, you can actually notice what the moment contains. When you're not afraid of your own depths, other people's depths stop being threatening.
The afternoon light has shifted while we've been talking, my colleague and I. Her latte has gone cold, untouched since that first question cracked something open. We've covered territory neither of us expected—her father's illness, her ambivalence about a promotion, the particular guilt of wanting things to change while fearing what change requires.
"I don't know why I told you all that," she says, finally.
I do. But I just nod, and let the silence hold us both.
If this resonated—if you recognize the quiet gift of being truly seen, or the exhaustion of maintaining your fragments—perhaps forward it to someone who might need permission to start becoming whole.
