a community conundrum
I've been very contemplative of community recently, and that's partly owing to a lot of very big changes in my life.
(I'm moving, for one. The other changes comprise a hodgepodge of personal-family-community angst that I've found myself caught in. Rather than untangle myself the complicated way, I've decided to cut loose and run. But that's a story for another day.)
The corners of social media where I lurk have been extolling the virtues of community, and particularly the kind of community found in non-Western spheres. The kind of community where a village raises a child. But I've been sceptical, because the greatest emotional and social damage done to me wasn't by my parents, as it was for so many people, but by the village that so many people are now glorifying. The immigrant community that rallied around us in times of distress was the same community that sought its price in children's pain and tears, in the gleeful high school drama of adults tearing each other to pieces.
The village has left me with more scars than a less socially orchestrated childhood might otherwise have done. It was other people's parents who smacked me when I asked a badly timed question or questioned authority without meaning to or was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Other people's parents who allowed, and even encouraged, their children bullying me and children like me because my parents earned less than theirs did. My community that made us bracelets with thorns and expected us to smile when they made us bleed.
So yes, I'm sceptical when people speak of collectivism today as though it is the One True Solution to everything colonisation has broken. It isn't. There's a reason so many of us community misfits have, at various points in our formative years, sought refuge in individualist social structures, if only to escape the chaos and covert violence that was so normalised in what we grew up with
And yet, there's a twisted security that comes with being a part of a community, even if it hurts you. You know that you will always have people to call if something goes wrong. You know that if they call on you, you'll show up however you can. There is something about community, even when it makes you want to disappear, that forces you to stay present.
I think maybe that's the element of community that people are grasping for so desperately. That anchor, that sense of a weight that, no matter how heavy, holds you down and keeps you from floating away entirely.
I'm grappling very hard right now with my place in this community, which only wants me on its own terms. Which will hurt those I love to punish me for my refusal to conform.
But I cannot help myself. It is who I am. My disbelonging has unmade me, and I feel that therein lies the truth to understanding my place.