What does it mean to share?

Lessons from an only child

This Christmas is going to be different, because—for the first time in the 30 years since she was born, I will not be spending the day with my daughter Jasmine. Yes, there are tears running down my face as I type these sentences because I’m going to miss her like crazy—but I think[1] I’m going to be OK.

In many ways, I’ve been practicing for this moment since I first gave birth and realized that it was possible for one of the most important parts of myself to become physically detached. Over the years, as I’ve learned to process the wonder and anxiety that this miracle brings, I’ve gradually (and I do mean gradually) come to realize that though she came from me, Jasmine does not belong to me. Whether I like it or not, I have to share her with the world.

Fortunately, I’ve done a lot of learning and growing this year, and I’m feeling more prepared than ever to face this unavoidable fact. At the core of it all lies a shift in how I think about what sharing means. But before I tell you where I’ve landed in this space, I’d love to ask what you think about when I ask, “What does it mean to share?” and if you’re so inclined, please take a moment to share it in the comments!

The first thing I realized while exploring this space is that the word share has six different definitions in the Oxford Language Dictionary, which I’ll summarize as:

· to give a portion of something to another (share resources)

· to occupy something jointly (share a room)

· to hold a view or opinion in common with another (share a love of horses)

· to tell someone about something (share a story)

· to post or repost something on social media[2] (share a post)

· a portion of a company (owning a share of Apple)

Once I set aside the wonder that the imprecision of the English language inevitably bestows upon me[3], I find myself noticing that there seem to be two fundamentally different types of sharing—one in which you have less of a thing because that thing is distributed amongst others (e.g., bullet points 1, 2, and 6), and another in which you have an opportunity to connect with someone else through a commonality (e.g., bullet points 3, 4, and potentially 5).

Now, in the spirit of the season of sharing, allow me to confess something pretty vulnerable: I suck at Sharing Type 1. Or maybe the more accurate thing to say is that I’m just a really late bloomer?

Thankfully, the amazing Dr. Jessica Sommerville, developmental researcher and mother to my friend Rosie (pictured below in a recent visit in which we shared a lot of stickers), has done the foundational research to help me understand not only why I might be below average in my desire to share resources, but also how closely interconnected the two types of sharing really are. One thing her work clearly demonstrates is how fundamental our ideas about fairness and sharing are to our social development. As early as 12-15 months of age, infants show evidence that they expect people to distribute resources evenly among group members.[4] When an experimenter seated at a table with two other adults is seen doling out three crackers to one person and only one to another, 15-month-old infants stare in disbelief. “Oh no they didn’t!” their baby brains seem to think. Later, if given the opportunity to play with a person who was observed sharing fairly (e.g., giving two crackers to each person) or unfairly, most of them choose to play with the fair person!

But Dr. Sommerville and colleagues also noticed individual differences in both how sensitive babies are to inequities in sharing, and in how willing they were to share their own preferred goodies with others. One factor that predicted both differences was whether the infants had siblings! As an only child who was also raised in two families without tons of financial resources, my tendency toward Sharing Type 1 stinginess starts to make sense.

I will also add—perhaps out of self-defense—that my relationship with my husband (who is the youngest sibling and one of the most generous humans I know), as well as the financial privileges that have come to me much later in life than most of the people I share a job with, have also helped me to get better at sharing resources. But what I know for sure, based on both positive psychology research and my lived experiences, is that even if you have little, when you give (or share) your resources, it sends a signal to your brain that you have enough. And this probably explains why helping others is one of the most reliable predictors of wellbeing!

I also understand, now more than ever, that both types of sharing are fundamentally part of my nature—and yours too! You see, we humans are social animals by design. This means that our brains evolved to share and cooperate with others in our “in groups.”[5] And as I started to write the words “Once upon a time, our survival depended on it,” I was reminded of an article I found when writing The Neuroscience of You. Published in 2015, based on a meta-analysis of data collected from over 300,000 people from around the world, the study showed that loneliness had a stronger influence on mortality rates than either excessive drinking or obesity! In other words, though the ways we rely on one another may be different now than they were in the hunter-gatherer times (when we lay in puppy piles keeping one another warm), we still need connection to survive.

And this is where I believe Sharing Type 2 becomes so critical. Because, while sharing your crackers can help you become a more valued community member, so does sharing your ideas. And unlike crackers, this type of sharing doesn’t leave you with less of anything! I think George Bernard Shaw said it best when he wrote:

“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”

One of the most precious gifts I received this year was the opportunity to share ideas with Emelie Cajsdotter. I don’t know how to describe Emelie. I’m not sure a million words would come any closer to the truth than what I might fit into a couple-thousand-word Substack piece. Instead, I’m choosing to focus on the powerful idea she has shared with me: empathic interbeing. Among the many exceptionally important roles she holds, Emilie helps people grow into better partners for their horses by helping them to become more connected. To do so, she teaches them about empathic interbeing, a kind of shared consciousness experience that Emilie describes as taking the bubble or the boundary of the self (which is largely imagined according to her world view) and expanding it to include others. “When you do,” Emilie said in a talk I attended this summer, “it’s not that one plus one equals two…. it equals something that’s never existed before—the unique combination of two beings that doesn’t exist anywhere else.”

Since we first met in August of 2024, I’ve been practicing, experiencing, and noticing these Sharing Type 2 experiences everywhere. In fact, I’ve come to realize that this is what drives me to spend the time and energy writing. It’s a belief that when I share my ideas and experiences with you, we both benefit (though this would be even more true if you’d be so kind as to leave a comment so I can receive your ideas as well)! After all, one of the most powerful inventions of the human mind is the ability to use language to share our personal thoughts, feelings and learnings in ways that might help others move forward without having shared those experiences directly.

And guess what? I’m learning through the ideas that have been shared with me, that if you are able to expand your sense of self and connect empathetically to the person you gave your cracker to, you get to have an entirely new experience: the goodness of that cracker felt through the perspective of someone else who didn’t have one in the moment before.

I know I will miss my daughter—tremendously—tomorrow, like every other day that we’re apart.[6] But I am also discovering a new kind of joy in sharing her with her partner and his family. And through this experience, we have the opportunity to grow into something new, a community that never existed before, connected by love and our celebration of family.

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[1]I am feeling confident, but given that the last major holiday without her (Thanksgiving 2018) ended with me pretty drunk and crying in bed by 3:00 p.m., I’m still open to the possibility that it will be an epic fail.

[2] Yes, this specific example is in the Oxford Dictionary and if it makes you feel old—me too.

[3]…which I feel like I can do, if only because I covered it to some extent in my last post: What does it mean to be intelligent?

[4] You can read more about this work here: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5438913/

[5] I’m not going to talk about how we treat the out-groups because this is the holiday season and that is not a freaking cheery topic.

[6] I’m also here to connect in that space of missing with any of you who may be feeling lonely, perhaps even missing someone who won’t be returning in this lifetime— because missing loved ones is shitty, and specific, and it’s also one of the most unifying human experiences.