I have an independent spirit.
I go to concerts and rallies alone. I fly to unfamiliar cities alone for 24 hours, without a hotel reservation or a place to stay, and sleep in the lobby of airports. I moved to a college hundreds of miles home that I had never visited.
I don't let anything or anyone stop me from doing what I want to do, because life is too short to be afraid to go it alone sometimes.
The experiences I've had have taught me a lot about humanity. No matter where I am, there always seems to be someone that sympathizes with my situation and takes me under their wing.
The father at LaGuardia who let me plug my dying phone into his laptop so that I'd have my ticket to go through security, while I slept in a chair next to him. The fellow concert-goer in San Francisco who let me come to her hotel room for a few hours so that I didn't have to be on the street until 4 a.m. The couple at a campaign rally in a not-so-friendly area of Chicago that drove me and another stranger home. The mom and daughter at a late-night improv show who did the same.
None of these people knew my last name. Some of them never knew my first. But we struck up a conversation somehow, maybe I laughed at an overheard joke or just flat-out asked if I could tag along. And somewhere along the way, they recognized the situation I was in and immediately came to help.
I think all too often we demonize strangers. I can't say bad things don't happen, or that I haven't been lucky with the people I've met. I certainly have. But we forget that most strangers are just people like us -- people who have also felt alone and afraid.
One of these strangers told me once that they would have wanted the same if the situation was reversed, and that if they had heard something had happened to me and they could've stopped it by detouring off the highway for less than 10 minutes, they never would've forgiven themselves. They didn't know me beyond our few-hours-long conversation -- they barely knew my first name -- but because we shared one thing in common -- our humanity -- they put all of that aside.
Most of these strangers never found out my name or my phone number; we never shared social media or e-mail addresses. "Good luck with everything," most of them would say before heading off to their lives and loved ones. I don't remember their faces, but I remember the impact they had on me -- the safety they offered -- and it's inspired me to do the same in the future.
To those "strangers" who have become Twitter followers, or Facebook friends, and even the ones who didn't, thank you for what you did, no matter how small. I will never forget it, and I hope that one day I can pass on that act of kindness to another stranger like me.
To everyone else, help a stranger. That stranger might just become a friend.
