Come As You Are: Hayle’s New Weekly Meet Up Is Open

Hayle Meet Up opens on Monday 20th April from 1-3pm. We meet at the Annex at Hayle Daycare Centre. Find out more here.

There’s a moment a lot of quieteers know well. You’ve heard about something, thought it might be for you, turned it over in your mind for a while. Maybe you’ve looked at the website a few times. Maybe you’ve nearly sent an email, then closed the tab.

The first step is the one that costs the most. Not the journey there, not walking through the door, though those things count too. It’s the decision. The private, quiet moment where you say, yes, I’ll try this.

Something like that happened for Sue. She’d been living in Hayle for nearly seventeen years and hadn’t yet found a way into the community around her. Then she found Quiet Connections, and something opened up. She started coming to Meet Ups in Camborne. She found her people. And now, a little while later, she’s part of the small volunteer team bringing the very first Hayle Meet Up to life, so others in her town can have the same experience she did.

“Attending Quiet Connections meet ups has really made a difference to my rather quiet life… I am so looking forward to having a Hayle meet up in the town I have called home for nearly 17 years, but hadn’t found the courage to venture out into the community until I discovered Quiet Connections” – Sue

That’s the thing about this community. The people who welcome you at the door are the very people who once stood outside it themselves.

Starting on Monday 20th April, Quiet Connections has a new weekly gathering in Hayle. It runs every Monday from 1pm to 3pm in the Annexe at Hayle Day Care Centre on Commercial Road. The space looks out onto the river. You can watch the birds. It’s calm, small, and chosen with care.

Hayle is the latest addition to a network of weekly Meet Ups running across Cornwall, including Truro, Falmouth, Penzance, Camborne, Redruth, Liskeard, Wadebridge, Helston, and online. Each one is run by local volunteers, people who are part of the quieteer community themselves and who understand, from their own experience, what it means to want connection but find certain kinds of social situations genuinely hard going.

That understanding shapes everything about how Meet Ups feel. There’s no expectation that you’ll be particularly chatty, or that you’ll introduce yourself to the room. You can ease in gradually. You can sit with a colouring sheet or a book while conversation moves around you. You can have a cup of tea and not say very much at all, and no one will find that strange, because a fair number of people there will be doing something similar, especially early on.

Conversation starter cards are on the tables if you want something to reach for. Colouring, drawing and word searches are available each week and you’re also welcome to bring your own project. There is no pressure around any of it.

When we shared the news about Hayle, I found myself thinking about the volunteers who made it happen. I’ve watched people come through the door for the first time feeling uncertain, and then gradually become the ones holding the space for someone else. That arc doesn’t always make it into the headline version of what we do, but it’s one of the things I’m most proud of.

There’s the practical reality of what a Meet Up offers: company, conversation or a place to ‘be’ alongside others, something to do with your hands, biscuits and a hot drink. All of that matters. But underneath it, something else builds up over time. A sense that you’re capable of this. That showing up is something you can do. That the people around you aren’t judging how much or how little you say.

Hannah, who was previously coming to the Hayle group that existed before covid, put it plainly. She said she used to be very shy and find conversations hard. Now, she said, she feels more able to open up and join in. She still loves having colouring sheets to work with while she chats. She left each session feeling more confident than when she arrived.

Nothing about this is about becoming a different kind of person. It’s about having space to be the kind of person you already are, and finding that you can grow within that rather than in spite of it.

Colin, another Hayle quieteer, described what he values about the group as being able to chat along with everyone or sit in silence and enjoy his own quiet space without fear of being judged. Both, he said, feel safe. That combination isn’t something you find in many places. It takes a certain kind of facilitation, and a certain kind of community, to hold both at once without one cancelling out the other.

The venue helps. The Annexe at Hayle Day Care Centre is not a busy room. It’s a calm space, with a view of the water and the birds.

Quiet Connections has been going since 2017, and in that time the approach hasn’t changed much at its heart, even as the community has grown. You come as you are. You’re not there to perform wellness or demonstrate sociability or push through something. You’re there to be alongside other people who understand this particular way of being in the world.

The new Hayle Meet Up is a natural part of that, it’s the community finding its feet in a new location. The people who have made it happen are the same people who’ll be there every Monday. They’ve been through their own version of that first nervous visit. They know what it means when someone walks through the door not quite sure they should have come.

You don’t need to register. You can drop in. But if you’d like to let the team know you’re coming, especially for your first visit, you can do that via the booking form on the Hayle webpage here. They’ll say hello beforehand and answer anything you want to know.

The space is free to attend. It’s open to anyone in the area who identifies as quiet, introverted, shy or highly sensitive. If that sounds like you, even a little, it’s worth the trip.