5. Community (JW)
Santa Cruz, USA
Dear Hana,
Right now I’m stretched out on a couch in a beautiful Airbnb in Santa Cruz on a trip I organized with a few friends. This trip was pitched to my friends as a writing retreat. While I definitely do intend to get some solid writing time in, this trip also serves a second purpose: a tiny experiment in community building.
Whenever I reflect upon how my closest friends ended up holding that title, I inevitably return to this pet theory I like to call my “context theory”. The theory goes like this: you end up closest to the people you interact with in the most contexts. I think this is true for me because I care so much about seeing others as complete people, and being seen as such, rather than a pinhole projection from a single angle. I’m not interested in the shiny exterior without seeing the grinding gears inside. My therapist suggested a label for me which I wholeheartedly embrace: “authenticity junkie”.
I guess I should explain what I mean by “contexts”. I’ve cooked with friends, danced with friends, played badminton with friends, watched movies with friends, gotten drunk with friends, worked with friends, and one time driven around in a 15 person van in Arizona with friends wearing onesies. Interacting in each of these contexts offers an additional vantage point to view and be viewed from. All of my closest friends are the ones where we’ve managed to collect these multi-angled perspectives on each other.
Even though we’ve spent all of the past decade (decade!?!) living in different cities, I think we’ve managed to retain a bond because of how many contexts we’ve connected through. From being academic peers for seven years, to asking you out (and being turned down by you) in the eighth grade, to awkward slow dances in high school, to military bootcamp-esque badminton training under the drill sergeant gaze of Mr. Tang, to preventing you from getting us all busted for drinking underage in a hotel in Ottawa, to watching you deny tension with a beautiful friend of yours in New York, to lying on a beach in Denmark with you, we’ve shared a lot of contexts, and through them a lot of our inner workings.
In those first seven years, our shared contexts were largely easy to opt into. School provided us a pressure-cooker environment to get to know our peers and see each other through many lenses: mathematically, artistically, musically, and athletically through mandatory shared classes, and playfully through lunchtimes spent running around together and laughing over card games. Many of our angles were naturally exposed to the light of our peers’ gazes by virtue of moving through these contexts together.
In each phase of life after high school, I’ve been struck by the increasing need for intentionality. In university, lectures were much less of a social environment than the high school classroom was, both by virtue of the size, and by virtue of being decoupled from working time where we were free to interact. Out with the six-person stable clusters of desks, in with the amphitheatre style seating directing us all to look forward rather than at each other.
The nature of focused majors declared upon entry at Waterloo also resulted in a much narrower context of shared experience. Socializing and play were to be sought elsewhere: usually school clubs or parties. The chances of meeting the same people in multiple contexts was relatively high, though still much lower than it was in high school. Your social network becomes subtly partitioned by activity, where each group sees you from a smaller set of angles.
I’ve spent the last few years increasingly partitioned: I have the friends I work with, the friends I dance with, the friends I play badminton with, and the friends I party with. And those groups have become almost totally distinct, with a few key people weaving a web between them and preventing me from feeling totally fragmented. Unsurprisingly, those that weave that web are among my closest friends.
The enclosing community that would normally link these grew with each phase of life: from the hundreds in high school to the thousands in university to the hundreds of thousands being a working adult in San Francisco. With that growth came increasing fragmentation.
So: intentionality. I’ve decided this year I’m going to take a more proactive role in weaving this web. I want to construct the contexts and provide the lenses to see those around me with more multifaceted clarity and be seen as such too.
The formula I’m toying with at the moment is pretty simple: pick a shared activity (in this case writing), gather friends linked by that activity, find a way to spend a lot of time together, eat together, share stories, and sleep under the same roof for a time. Perhaps with a tinge of inebriation. While the sheer number of contexts has its place, I think there’s something special about breaking bread, recounting tales of past lives, and cherishing the night in the same building that can uniquely bond people.
I’m just dipping my toes into the water of community building, and like all of my interests, I’m sure it’ll rise and fall in my priorities like the tides. But I’ve had a wonderful weekend full of laughter and stories and the pleasure of uniting people who may have never met. So there is something here that I feel pulling me, and I’m increasingly reluctant to ignore these pulls.
I know some people revel in the ability to live multiple lives in parallel and become a pure expression of some personality trait in each arena, but for whatever reason, I crave being seen whole.
May you feel seen however you wish,
Your authenticity junkie friend,
Jamie
