september 2020+1: community
who are we when we’re together?
weekly essays + prompts:
Featured
What did you learn from your childhood about being a member of a community? Not in words, but in actions. How did you see people being treated? The written rules and lived experiences gave me contradicting ideals as I sat in pews, hearing moms critique the way that other families dressed for church. It is now my work to tap into my instincts and trust myself enough to build communities that function differently than the hypocrisy of the most readily available communal-model I had: a white-washed Catholic school running on oil money.
No matter what creed, country, or disability, each of us has been born into this carbon-based existence. We all rely on plants to take our exhales and turn them into inhales. Each human being has lived under the same decaying ozone layer. This realization of dependence on shared resources makes me wonder how anyone could be indifferent to the survival and quality of life of anyone else...and yet that is not the reality I see when I stare into the void of a screen.
Realizing all of me could never be completely known by all of someone else (and vice versa), I mourned this idealized sense of connection and community I once yearned for. And where else could I go from this grief other than further into my study of self, excavating parts of me that I misunderstood because I’d chosen to take someone else’s word for it and instead of speaking what I knew, my truth.
We feel entitled to our resentments often because there is a personal wound that they’re trying so desperately to keep hidden. Our culture makes a habit out of keeping us in the entitlement rather than encouraging us to work through the emotions until we weep for our own pain that we keep enacting onto others. It is a much more heartbreaking process to traverse our wounds and take responsibility rather than doubling down on our initial defensiveness. We must allow this process to split us open, revealing all of the instances in which we have lived through examples of the harm we now unintentionally inflict on our communities.