Everyone says they want ‘community’, but do they also want the endless social obligations, 3am crisis calls, constant attention to the trust between two people who aren’t you, hours spent on the phone hearing why one person is mad at another? And this is in a healthy community!
There’s also the agony of having put your faith in a group of people and watching that group crumble or the faith be unearned, the anxiety of new-group formation, the need to protect from people who will poison the well, & the self-doubt about whether you’re doing the right thing
Not saying you shouldn’t, but it feels like ‘community’ often has fantasy air-quotes around it and it’s held up as this angelic god-mother endless love space where you don’t also have actual work to do and sometimes feel threatened and alone.
It’s all part of the deal.
It’s all part of the deal.
‘Community’ defined by lonely people has no structure, no trade-offs, no pain, and real community has all of those and is still definitely worth it but you need to understand that that’s what you’re getting in for and such tight bonds have their own cost too.
Just like you can’t expect your lover to seem the way they did in the honeymoon period, a real, functioning community has warts and feuds and vices and if you don’t think it will because your envisioned community is special I have news for you buddy
And this is great! Because once you can stop putting mythical god-mother Community on a pedestal you can actually just see her, and hang out with her, and get good at holding your own little community together.
(And maybe stop looking in the wrong places! Maybe you don’t need a new fancy plan thought up by a charismatic white man with lots of land and entirely new social norms etc etc. Maybe you just need a small group of friends who know, over time, that they can rely on each other.)
Oh yeah, and the fucking bureaucracy. Don’t get me started on the bureaucracy.
https://twitter.com/mandyquietly/status/1332106184090914820?s=21
https://twitter.com/mandyquietly/status/1332106184090914820
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