Community. Healing. Together.

Community is vital for human survival.  We don’t all need the same volume, frequency, or flavor of social connection, but we all need it like we need water, food and air.  For how vital it is, it’s unfortunate so many things get in the way of fulfilling social connections for so many people.  Perfectionism, trauma, undeveloped communication skills, the patriarchy.  All the things that prevent us from showing up as our fullest selves because it’s not safe or not allowed or not good enough.

And even once we work through some of our own personal baggage, we will forever be performing maintenance on our reconfigured systems because we continue to exist in the societal soup of all that same bullshit.  Even with as much healing as I have done, I still have to do the math each day on how many and which pieces of emotional armor I need to put on before going out in the world.  And when I get home I have to do the emotional labor of taking that armor off.  I'm lucky I don't have to leave it all on all the time.  It’s really a miracle any of us manage to get together at all, but we do.

Despite all the challenges (and often because of those challenges), we gather.  We come together and we form community.  And that's amazing.  It's definitely a relief to be around other folks who have been through some of the same things I have lived in my life.  It's healing to experience belonging and togetherness.  And it's important to make sure we're working through the collective baggage all together as a group.  Otherwise those things we're working so hard to heal in ourselves and actively resist from greater society continue in our community spaces and get in the way of relating to each other.

No matter how much we have in common, if I spend time with someone who can't or won't see me as a complete and complex person, that interaction cannot satisfying my desire for connection because it isn't connection.  If I have to keep my mask on, it's just hiding in the presence of another human.  And while there can definitely be value in being alone together, that's not the same thing as social connection.  When I spend time with someone who sees and hears me fully as an entire being, then I feel connected to that person.  And that's when I feel belonging.

It may sound obvious, but it seems important to note: any attempt to manufacture the feeling of belonging by extracting it from others will always fail.  Unfortunately this is a mistake I keep seeing communities make, including communities of people routinely othered by greater society.  When default society spaces have no room for you, it's important to find or create a space that feels affirming and safe.  To be safe it often means some demographics must be excluded from those spaces, and that's perfectly fine.

It becomes a problem if the only glue that holds your group together is being better than someone else.  Deriving your value by comparison to a "less valuable" version of person or lifestyle or hobby is no value at all.  That's not healing from the wounds of society constantly saying you aren't good enough or rich enough or smart enough or beautiful enough or normal enough.  That's just passing on your trauma to someone else, and it perpetuates all the problems you were trying to escape by creating that new space in the first place.

Recently I have witnessed a group of folks wade into a new practice of non-monogamy without doing the prerequisite community emotional labor that creates a solid foundation of trust to build other relationships upon.  These otherwise level-headed folks bought into a nonsense belief that having multiple romantic connections somehow eliminates your responsibility to tend the connections with those people.  It's like they think detaching from the societal expectation of monogamy detaches them from responsibility for how they impact the people around them.  In case you're wondering: it doesn't.

It also doesn't make you a more evolved human or get you any closer to enlightenment.  Practicing non-attachment with people is more about not attaching your expectations to those people; not shirking all responsibility for your friends and fellow community members.  That’s just accountability avoidance.  I can have as many emotional, physical, and/or romantic connections as I have availability in my calendar and it doesn't negate my need to occasionally rely upon others and be reliable for others in-turn.  It doesn't have to be my partner's fault that something they said triggered me, they can still listen to my hurt feelings with compassion and offer me care as I do the work to heal from that wound in my past.

There is no shortcut to healing.  You just have to do the work.  We each have to tend our inner selves and we all have to tend the physical and emotional spaces we share together.  Community is a mirror.  Looking into that mirror allows us an opportunity for recovery.  A chance to confront and reconcile with our inner demons while being held in loving support by our fellow human beings.  Incorporating more pieces of ourselves into the whole is how we heal.  Detaching from people won't get you there; all it does is allow you to hide from yourself.

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Information and Inspiration

• The Social Creatures: The Evolution of Social Connection as a Basic Human Need
• The Atlantic: The Mystery of Partner ‘Convergence’
• TicTok: madeline_pendleton - the libertarian town with bears and trash
• Polyphilia: Emotional Libertarianism in Polyamory: Are We Responsible for Other People’s Feelings?
• Instagram: alokvmenon - This was my favorite speech of the year
• Goodreads: A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster