My relationship & search for community, Part I
My friend Victoria and I have joked that we’re lucky we’ve never run into a cult leader because we think we’d be easy to initiate.
There’s an allure to being part of something bigger than yourself, to a group of people where you feel seen and safe, a place where your interests are validated by people who are passionate about the same things as you. We see this throughout society everywhere- religious groups, sports events, running groups, knitting groups, clubs of any kind. They all provide the thing so many of us want and need -- community. As a self proclaimed introvert, I see the need for this more than ever, not despite being an introvert, but because I’m an introvert.
From childhood to my early 30’s, I always had community, only I wouldnt have called it that. I just thought of these people as my friends.
I grew up with a tight knit group of girlfriends from elementary school to high school, and these women practically raised me. In college, I somehow managed to easily develop a strong friend group my freshman year, which only got stronger through the 6 years I lived in Philadelphia. The people in this phase of my life showed me the power of chosen family, and I think at that time, we each would have gladly laid down our lives for each other.
Simply put, we loved each other fiercely and joyfully.
After Philadelphia, I moved to NYC in my late 20’s and moved in with one of my best friends Emma. Being a social maven in her own way, Emma already knew some folks in the city, and from there our social circle organically grew. Not to mention, NYC is one of the easiest places to meet people, in my opinion. I had two significant jobs while living in NY. One was managing a busy coffee shop in Brooklyn, where customers and staff alike were people who I ended up hanging out with outside of work. One of my co-workers remains one of my best friends to this day (except now she lives in Israel). After that, I started my first desk job at a nonprofit in Fort Greene. The consensus of every single person who's ever worked there agrees, to this day, that this non profit had THE BEST staffing/work place culture of any job they’ve ever had. We were all close in age, liberal, creative, passionate folks who became best friends with each other (some people even dating and getting married). We hung out at work, and on weekends we went to baseball games together, started a book club, traveled together. Honestly, I never categorized myself as someone who made friends easily, but as I type this I now see how lucky I was to develop community in every phase of my life until my early 30’s.
Then, in 2016, I made a huge life change.
I followed my dreams and moved in with my parents in Taiwan to start my own business, which took place completely online. I knew that the nature of the transition (working remotely, being in a different country, not having any co-workers) would be a solo endeavor, but at the time, I welcomed and relished the change. It felt like a breath of fresh air to live a more quiet, restful life (while cutting back on the drinking, too). Even though I was often social in my previous life, I always, ALWAYS loved being alone. I know I just made it sound like I was always hanging around with people, my community, but the truth is, I was also always craving solitude. I was often the one my friends had to convince to go out because I enjoyed being in my room doing “stuff” that I could never quite explain to my friends. I had music I wanted to organize, scarves I wanted to knit, news articles to finish and cleaning to do. Anyway, the point is, it was during this time in Taiwan that I was able to dive head first into my antisocial behavior without apology. To just do… whatever the fuck I wanted. And it was HEAVEN.
So…. I didnt notice when 3 years later, I hadn’t made any new friends or developed any kind of new community. I wasnt lonely because I had my cousins (who I adore and am very close with), a lot of family, mother nature, the occasional friend who would come and visit me in taiwan, and my clients who I saw online via 90 minute zoom calls. I did, however, manage to reconnect with an old crush of mine, and we started dating seriously. The thing is, he was an introvert too. Even more so than I was! So when I moved back to America to start a new life with him in Arizona, we nested- HARDCORE. We did that annoying thing that some couples do where we disappeared and didnt make an effort to make new friends. I honestly thought this was just what people did in their mid-thirties. Many of my friends were settling down, getting married, having kids and we thought we were gonna do the same thing- get a dog, and embrace domestic bliss! As you can imagine, running a solo online business plus claiming a new homebody status with your long term introvert partner = more isolation. Then covid hit. I was one of the lucky ones. Like, really lucky. I THRIVED during covid. That’s how I knew I really was an introvert. I loved my life during that time, which I know is an insensitive thing to say about a period when many people were dying and struggling, but I want to be honest. I had my own apartment for the first time which I loved, but still had the companionship of a partner who I loved (but thankfully, did not live with at the time :) I also didnt have kids, and from what I could tell, it was the parents of small children who had it the worst. The fact that I didnt have to socialize and also didnt have to feel guilty about it suited me.
However, somewhere along the line, the isolation started to wear on me. I used to be so social, I thought. I used to have a core group of people I could turn to when I was looking for friendship, fun, commiseration. I still had a lot of close friends, but it was no longer a GROUP of people that met in person regularly. They were instead individual friends scattered across the country and beyond.
And then it happened. My partner of five years and I split. The yearning for community came in even before we split, but it was definitely illuminated by the split. As a 38 year old woman without kids, who didnt know if she wanted to have kids, it felt more important than ever to have community. For selfish reasons, and I think that’s okay :)
For better or worse, our parents are often the models of what we think is possible or normal in the world. My parents stopped having vibrant social lives after my mom got sick (she was in her 30’s). My mom burned all her bridges through her alcoholism and mental illness, and my dad, having his own unresolved trauma, shut people out. Now, in their 70’s, I see that they’re lives are devoid of solid, long term friendships and community. I often wonder, how different would their lives be, how much happier and healthier would they be, if they have a group of people they could turn to for connection and camaraderie?
Isolation, we are told, contributes to poor health and is a growing epidemic not just amongst the elderly, but really everyone. And in my new found singledom, I saw that
My introversion was not a problem. I do not see it as a shortcoming. But there was a trade off. And that trade off was that I didnt build community for myself in the new places I had moved to
I did not want to rely on my partner or a nuclear family as my community. I always knew this, but I never did anything about it because it was always easier to default to my comfort zone. I wanted a GROUP of people who I could turn to for different needs, and to spread out the responsibility to maximize the the capacity we all have
Proximity matters. I loved that I could still call any one of my besties any time of the day and chat if I wanted. I loved the amazingly deep, meaningful conversations I could have with my friends via recorded voice notes. I loved my friends who lived in the same city as me that I would see every other weekend for a great dinner or a fun game night. But even that wasn’t enough. I wanted EASE and convenience. I wanted the neighbor whose house I could pop into when I needed sugar or the friend who lived 5 minutes away to drive over and binge watch mindless tv with me as we ate icecream until the late hours
I wanted an insurance policy. For if I never got married, for if I got married and my partner died in a freak accident, for my partner if I died, or if anyone got sick. I wanted to know that there would be people there who had the bandwidth to take care of me and me of them, feeling like we had the capacity because we were sharing an equal load, or at least taking turns making space for each other when we fell
I wanted a community for all these reasons and more!
So I started to wonder- how does one find/build community? And what does community look and feel like for someone like me, who considers themselves an introvert but who also knows that as a human, I need people just like they need me? That of course, as humans, connection is instrict to who I am? How would I even define community and what, in an ideal world, would that look like? Can I even use the word ideal in this scenario, or am I already being overly idealistic? How does one find/build/cultivate community in a world that is growing more separate due to capitalism (aka feeling like we’re always busy and not having the capacity or time to socialize), infrastructure (neighborhood and cities that dont seem conducive to community living), colonialism, social media, the option to live anywhere in the world etc etc etc
These are all questions I set out to discover for myself when I moved to Hybrasil House. Stay tuned for part II to see what I’ve learned so far.