There’s a table I go back to every week.
Mostly the same faces. The same corner of the same café. The same low hum of conversation that doesn’t go anywhere in particular.
Someone asks how the dog is. Someone complains about parking. Someone mentions what their child or grandchild has been doing. Someone remembers who was away last week.
Nobody is there to process anything. Nobody is sharing anything difficult. We talk about ordinary things — what’s happening locally, what has been frustrating about the week, what someone is planning to do next — and then we leave and go back to our separate lives.
For a long time, I didn’t count this as connection.
It felt too light. Too easy. Like a substitute for the real thing, which I imagined involved more depth, more mutual disclosure, more weight.
I’ve changed my mind about that.
When I left the RAAF, I lost something I didn’t have a name for at the time.
It wasn’t just the structure, or the rhythm, or the clarity of knowing my role. It was the belonging that came built into the institution. You didn’t have to build it from scratch. It arrived with your posting.
The people around you understood the rules because they had lived inside them too. They knew the language, the expectations, the odd humour, the invisible lines. You belonged by default, before you had done anything extra to deserve it.
Civilian life does not come with that.
You have to construct belonging in environments where the social code is unwritten and shifts without warning. Where people do not share the same frame of reference. Where the question *what do you do?* means something entirely different from what it meant when you were serving.
Research on veteran transition describes this as **experiential isolation** — the particular disconnection that can happen after service, when the shared moral compass and common language of military life no longer apply in the same way.
Many veterans find themselves in a kind of in-between state: no longer part of the military, not quite belonging anywhere else either.
That description landed uncomfortably close.
It also helped.
Because there is some relief in discovering that something you thought was a personal failure is actually a documented pattern. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare found that more than half of Australian veterans in psychological distress do not feel part of their local community. One in five veterans report being lonely.
For a long time, I lived somewhere inside those numbers.
During the years when I was most isolated, I think I was looking for civilian connection that felt equivalent to what service had provided.
The depth. The shared experience. The sense of being known without having to explain the context. The mutual understanding that came from having lived inside the same institution, with the same expectations and pressures.
I kept measuring civilian connection against that standard and finding it insufficient.
The problem was not that the connection on offer was worthless.
The problem was the standard I was measuring it against.
It turns out there is research for the thing I resisted for years.
Low-demand connection — the people we know enough to sit with, chat with, and recognise across a room — is not a consolation prize for deeper friendship. It has its own value.
Researchers sometimes call these relationships **weak ties** or **fringeships**: more than strangers, not quite close friends. The names sound a little clinical, as research terms often do, but the thing itself is ordinary.
The person at the café.
The familiar face at a group.
The person who notices when you were not there last week.
Research into these lighter forms of connection keeps finding that they matter. People tend to feel happier and more connected on days when they have more of these small interactions. Even a brief, genuine exchange with someone like a barista can shift mood more than we expect.
There is a phrase for this too: **Vitamin S**.
Social contact as a nutrient.
Not always a feast. Not always something deep and transformative. Sometimes just a small dose of ordinary human contact, taken regularly enough to make a difference.
The coffee table is Vitamin S.
I just did not know that was what it was.
I should be clear about what it isn’t.
It isn’t the same as being deeply understood.
Most people at that table do not know the shape of what I carry, or where it comes from. They know the surface details: roughly what I do, roughly where I live, whether the week has been annoying or manageable.
And that is the point.
This kind of connection does not ask me to explain myself. It does not require disclosure. It does not turn every interaction into a recovery exercise.
I can just arrive.
Sit down.
Order coffee.
Be part of the ordinary noise of other people.
There is something quietly healing in that.
Not because anyone is fixing anything. Not because I am being drawn into some grand emotional breakthrough. But because there is a place I can go where my presence is expected and my absence would eventually be noticed.
That is not nothing.
For some of us, it is a beginning.
There is something I have noticed about what belonging does to the internal voice I wrote about recently.
The one that runs in the background and files everything as evidence.
Connection interrupts it.
Not because anyone at the table knows the voice is there. Not because anyone is countering its arguments or offering reassurance. But because being in a room with people who expect you to be there quietly asserts something the voice would prefer you forget:
You exist in relation to others.
And that matters.
The belonging does not have to be profound to do that work.
It just has to be consistent.
The table. Every week. The same faces, the same corner, the same ordinary conversation.
Enough to remind me I am still connected to the world.
And some weeks, that is no small thing.
*If you have rebuilt connection after service — or you are still trying to — I would like to hear what that has looked like. Not the version where it worked out cleanly. The actual version.*
**Sources**
- Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. (2023). *Veteran social connectedness: Social isolation and loneliness*. AIHW. https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/veterans/veteran-social-connectedness/contents/social-isolation-and-loneliness
- Williamson, V., Stevelink, S. A. M., & Greenberg, N. (2022). Exploring the role of social connection in interventions with military veterans diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder: Systematic narrative review. *Frontiers in Psychology, 13*, 873885. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9305387/
- Sandstrom, G. M., & Dunn, E. W. (2014). Social interactions and well-being: The surprising power of weak ties. *Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 40*(7), 910–922. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0146167214529799
- Fingerman, K. L., Birditt, K. S., Fiori, K. L., Hall, J., Huxhold, O., Rauer, A., Sandstrom, G. M., & Sprecher, S. (2025). More than an acquaintance less than a friend: Fringeships in everyday life. *Review of General Psychology*. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10892680251357549
- Alvarez, K., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2021). Vitamin S: Why is social contact, even with strangers, so good for us? *Current Directions in Psychological Science, 30*(4), 307–314. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/09637214211002538