Volume 4, Issue 3: On Community
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Hi friends! A couple (few?) weeks ago Nicole and I had seen a Tweet that was something to the effect of “quit posting boring shit online no one cares” and I was like, wow, okay, I don’t know who put Saran Wrap on that person’s toilet seat but okey-dokey. Nicole mentioned she rarely posts on social media because she feels that not much in her day-to-day is interesting enough to put online and when she said that it gave me pause because I rarely think of what I post in terms of its potential of being interesting to other people. I am in no way judging that use of social media and folks use social media for many different personal and professional reasons.
It did get me thinking about why I, personally, use social media. It’s a frequent topic I mention to my therapist, mostly in the “I scroll through social media too much and there are other things I’d rather be doing than staring at my phone.” I have been trying to think about what I do get out of it, especially as I am not an influencer and I am not dependent on my social media following to pay my rent and keep food in the fridge. I do love the access to information, of course, and I like seeing cool art and fashion and people doing neat clever things but that is more about why I look at social media and not why I actively participate by sharing out.
What I have come up with, though, is that I lean more heavily toward the “social” part of social media. I have scrolled back through some of my Tweets and my Instagram posts and highlights and so much of my vibe seems to be around building connections for connection’s sake. Cultivating community for community’s sake. Not for capitalism. Not for ego. It’s just nice, I guess, to be able to put something weird out on the internet and someone else is like, “me too!” and then you’re internet friends. Making friends and building community as an adult can be so incredibly complicated and I just try to hold onto that ease we had as children. Like, “Hey, that’s a cool flip you did on the monkey bars, let’s be friends!” I realize I cling very hard, maybe naively, to some of the magic of childhood and I think that making friends and being friends is one of those things I have an absolute death-grip on. A person who is one of my current best friends walked up to me on the first day of move-in in college and said, “Hi! I like you. We’re going to be best friends.” This is an absolutely batshit thing to do and I laughed so hard and yes she is still one of my best friends to this day.
I’ve been reading more about community-building and friendship as well. I got most of the way through Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make--And Keep--Friends by Marisa G. Franco and I absolutely devoured How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community by Mia Birdsong. I highly recommend the latter to learn more about the importance of community. I also recommend Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World by Vivek H. Murthy. I admit, I had taken the idea of community for granted for a long time because it was a given. I hadn’t realized that this is not true for a lot of folks in the U.S. and I have learned especially in the past few years how the American culture around individualism has absolutely fucked people over in a million ways, the obvious being the deaths and massive disabling from the current pandemic.
I know I have used the term “self-care” a lot and the common vernacular is absolutely saturated with the term to the point that it has lost all meaning. It is certainly a far cry from Audre Lorde’s original definition and intent. So much of what is touted as self-care is just capitalism and self-soothing. I do think there is a place for self-soothing and I don’t want it to be completely villainized; however, what has truly been self-care for me the past few years has been community-care. Community-care is self-care. People have shown up for me, Nicole, and my mother these past few weeks in overwhelming ways not because they are in debt to us or pity us, but because we are in community. Yes, yes, I know, “Hell is other people” but we are not going to get through this life in a way that is joyful without other people. There are many pretty fucking terrible things going on in the world and the only way we’re going to get through things is with each other.
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That’s it for this week! You can shop many books I’ve mentioned in this newsletter at my affiliate shop, The Infophile’s Bookshop, and support independent bookstores. In fact, any Bookshop, Amazon, or Etsy links in this newsletter are affiliate links so if you shop through those, it helps support my work. Or you can leave me a tip on Ko-fi, Paypal, or Venmo.
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