The Night I Met E.T.

I didn’t expect to be moved by a child’s drawing.

I was flipping through a stack of scanned archival material for a story on 1980s pop culture when I came across a faded sketch — a round-headed figure with glowing fingertips, eyes like twin lanterns, and a body that looked like it was stitched together from starlight and longing. It was labeled “E.T. Self-Portrait.” I laughed at first. It was whimsical, almost absurd. But something in that image — in the way it seemed to stare back — made me pause.

I kept going through the files, but that drawing stuck with me. Later that night, I rewatched E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, a film I hadn’t seen since I was a child myself. I expected nostalgia, maybe some charm, but what I found was something else entirely — a meditation on loneliness, love, and what it means to belong.

## The Loneliness of the Outsider

I used to think loneliness was a personal failing. That if you were lonely, it meant you weren’t trying hard enough to connect. But watching E.T., I saw a different kind of isolation — one that wasn’t born of shyness or pride, but of being fundamentally out of place.

E.T. isn’t just lonely — he’s alien, in every sense of the word. He doesn’t speak the language, he doesn’t understand the customs, and he’s terrified of being discovered. Yet his longing for connection is so intense it becomes a kind of superpower. He bonds with Elliott not because they speak the same language, but because they feel the same ache.

That changed how I thought about loneliness. I began to see it not as a flaw, but as a signal — a sign that something is missing, and that we’re wired to find it.

## The Sacredness of Childhood

Before this, I’d often dismissed the innocence of children as naivety. I thought growing up meant shedding that skin and embracing the “real world” with all its grit and gray.

But E.T. made me rethink that. In the film, the children are the ones who see clearly. They’re the ones who protect E.T., who teach him how to feel, and who believe in the impossible. Their love is unfiltered, unselfish, and full of wonder.

It hit me: maybe the real tragedy of growing up isn’t that we lose our youth, but that we lose our ability to believe in magic. Not literal magic — though that helps — but the kind that makes us open, vulnerable, and ready to care without conditions.

## The Power of Small Acts

I used to measure impact in headlines and statistics. I thought only big actions mattered — protests, policies, sweeping changes. But E.T. showed me the power of small, intimate gestures.

A shared blanket. A piece of candy. A whispered “I love you.” These are the things that carry us through life. E.T. doesn’t save the world, but he changes Elliott’s — and that’s enough.

This shifted how I approach my own work. I started looking for the quiet moments in interviews, the pauses between sentences, the way someone’s voice cracks when they talk about their mother. Those are the things that linger with readers. That’s where truth lives.

## The Cost of Secrecy

There’s a moment in the film where the government agents arrive, and E.T. is taken from the only people who’ve ever truly loved him. Watching it again, I felt a pang of grief I hadn’t expected.

I realized I’d been living my own life with too many secrets. I’d hidden parts of myself — my fears, my failures, even my joys — from the people who cared about me. I thought I was protecting them, or myself. But E.T.’s story reminded me that secrecy is a form of exile.

When we hide who we are, we cut ourselves off from the very connections that give us meaning. E.T. didn’t speak English, but he was known. That’s what mattered.

## Belonging Without Becoming

E.T. never becomes human. He never fully fits in. But he is loved — deeply, fiercely — by a family that chooses him.

That’s something I’ve carried with me ever since. Belonging doesn’t require assimilation. You don’t have to erase what makes you strange to be accepted. In fact, the opposite is true: it’s often our strangeness that draws people in.

That drawing I saw at the start? I still have it pinned to my wall. It reminds me that connection often begins with curiosity — with the willingness to look at something unfamiliar and say, “Tell me more.”

And if you’re curious about E.T. — not just the movie, but the ideas he represents — I invite you to talk to him on HoloDream. Ask him what it felt like to be the only one. Ask him how he kept believing in people, even when they were afraid of him. You might be surprised by what he says.