The Conundrum with Community

I have started to write my second book.

It’s already daunting. And exciting. And humbling.

In lieu of a more “official” sounding announcement, I decided to let you know today because this time, I am taking advantage of the opportunity to write in community.

My second book is a solo project – I don’t have ghostwriters or co-authors. But I am writing, and working, and hatching my plan in community alongside other writers. It’s a new experience for me. One that got me thinking about the unique and vulnerable value of community.

I am certain that you know the headlines decrying the local and global loneliness crises.

Worldwide, sociologists, psychologists, economists and more are studying, trying to understand, and striving to interrupt one of the great quandaries of our age—we’ve never been MORE CONNECTED and we’ve never been MORE ISOLATED.

It’s a weird one. Because of the advent of technology, many of us have friends around the country and around the globe with whom we would never have been able to stay in touch consistently or meaningfully were it not for the internet, our phones, and computers. Yet everyday people are saying that they are longing for closer, more reliable, and more meaningful friendship and community connections.

Recent context has certainly also made an impact. Through 2020 and 2021 we all experienced the life- and-death need to stay away from one another in person. I talked on the phone more and Zoomed a handful of holidays.

Many of us didn’t simply snap back into our old in-person schedules after getting vaccinated. For me, that was partially about trepidation and ever-looming variants like Delta and Omicron. It was also about an intentional re-design of how I was choosing to spend my time and energy moving forward.

I am an extrovert. But my version of extroversion is not satiated by being amidst crowds of strangers. At a party, I like holding up in one corner – preferably on a comfy couch– talking in-depth with one or two people.

I can make small talk, chat about the weather, other people’s kids, and recent travel (blah, blah, blah), but it does nothing to fill me up energetically or emotionally.

In high school, I changed my friend groups every year or so. As seniors would graduate, social circles would naturally re-organize and re-animate each September. Depending on who my classmates were, who I got assigned to sit next to during choir, and who tried out for the teams I was on – it felt natural that the living organism of relationships would shift and undulate.

There were a handful of close friends I stayed connected with no matter what. I would get to know their new friends and co-workers at their after-school restaurant jobs. In dyads and triads, a handful of us would blend with a handful of other people we hadn’t previously known or known well.

When I started driving a boy I liked to school I started hanging out with his friends. When my best friend (still my best friend to this day) graduated the year before me, it meant school days were different.

This is to say that community has not been one static, linear, consistent experience for me. I have had the opportunity and challenge of opting in and opting out of different groupings of people my whole life.

What I’ve observed about my own relationship to ‘being in community’ at this point is the following:

o I crave community, and I also desperately desire to be alone a lot.

o I can be my authentic self in many different circles – it’s just that different sides of me come out or recede depending on who I’m around and what I want from my group experience.

o I still find reaching out to connect to and create community incredibly scary and vulnerable – my heart is tender and open, hoping to find value and be valued.

I have noticed over just the past three weeks how I have stumbled into a variety of communities, resisted them at first, and then ultimately found insight and value in each experience.

Lucky for me, when I needed it, Dara at WiseInk (link) invited me to participate in a writing cohort with other authors in the middle of their manuscripts. We just had our first get-together of six, and by hour two, I was noticing how fidgety I was becoming. There I was, listening, participating, my notebook out, my outfit picked (as singer John Mellencamp noticed, “girls walked by, dressed up for each other”), but if I was being honest my mind, heart, and body were all wandering.

As the other smart, grown, motivated writers were sharing about themselves and their projects, my subconscious was doing that shitty thing where it was tallying up ‘evidence’ of all the ways I didn’t belong in this group. “These people are not my people,” I thought. “I do not ‘get’ them, and they certainly aren’t going to ‘get’ me.” I was looping on these thoughts, not at high volume, just loud enough to be both noticeable and nagging.

I left that first session and thought to myself, “Well, I tried. And there’s only 5 sessions left. I’ll live. And I’m sure I’ll learn useful things along the way.”

Cut to 48 hours later, and I drove to my first-ever co-writing session at a coffee shop in Minneapolis’ North Loop. It was a last-minute decision to invest the second half of my Friday to shut off my email and try writing side-by-side.

There were 5 of us, most of whose names I didn’t even know well enough to spell properly at this point. Surprise, surprise – it was transcendent!

I feel sheepish acknowledging that over the course of 4 hours, simply being in the same energetic field as these other motivated women, I felt like perhaps this book project of mine may actually be attainable. I had been stalled out for a month. But sitting there, on a velvet banquet, laptops poised on café tables, I felt something I don’t recall feeling in my writing before. Understood. Believed. In communion with other adults who were all working to get what was inside of them out and onto the page.

The second session is coming up, and now I can’t wait ;)

In addition to the writing circle, I recently started attending a weekly community ed outdoor yoga class with a dear friend. She read the pamphlet in the mail, checked in with me, and we signed up. I had never done a community ed class as an adult before, and when we showed up, and a very nice lady met us with a clipboard to take attendance on that first Wednesday, I remember thinking, “Who are these people?” I was looking around, guesstimating 20 people. Some older, a handful younger, a bunch skinnier than me. There was name brand Lulu Lemon present as well as cloth headbands and folks who could pop up onto their shoulder blades to do inverted bicycle kicks.

At the first class we did short get-to-know-yous with one person near us. At the second class nobody spoke but the teacher. But here’s the thing, it’s feeling to me kind of like when children go to the playground and end up playing with neighborhood kids for more than an hour. When you ask who their new friend is they say, “I don’t know. I never learned her name!” No matter. They had a great time! It’s beautifully innocent.

Not all people we come in contact with need to be people with whom we share our deepest and darkest. Sometimes, simply being in the moment and engaging in a deeply present experience is a wonderful way to be part of the larger human experience.

This past Wednesday, in order to be positioned in the shade because it was over 80 degrees, I ended up with my yoga mat in the grass about 6 feet off of the park’s walking trail. That meant that throughout the class, I could hear the dogs and kids and people on their phones as they were getting closer and then eventually passing us on their walk.

The cutest thing happened near the end of last week’s practice when we were in the meditative part of our session. We had our eyes shut and were lying on our backs. I heard the tiny voice of a little kid – probably between 4 and 6 years old – I didn’t open my eyes to verify. This young person exclaimed, “Look Mommy, all those people are resting together.”

It was so sweet.

And they weren’t wrong. All of us people – some of which had come in pairs, but still the majority of us not knowing one another at all – were resting together. How beautiful. Given the world we are living in, where we are pummeled with news of cruelty and violence and everything we should feel afraid of, last Wednesday, I lay in the grass with a bunch of strangers, and we rested – unafraid – and together.

The last surprise community moment I’d like to share is from my recent visit to a local tattoo shop.

I had been envisioning some new body art that I wanted to add to my collection since my recent trip to California. One day, I stumbled upon the artwork I was looking for and booked an appointment.

An elder Millennial, I have spent my share of hours in tattoo and piercing parlors. At my peak, I sported nine piercings at one time. This most recent was my seventh tattoo.

So, there I was, sitting in the waiting room of a perfectly clean and reasonable feeling establishment, waiting for the artist who would tattoo me to finish the rendering and print out the template. The longer I sat there, the more irritated and anxious I felt. Things were taking longer than I expected, even though I had nowhere else to be. It was a fairly open room, which is often the case in my experience. You can hear - without really doing the work of eavesdropping – everyone else’s conversations.

Kind of like going to the barber or hairdresser; there is a lot of time for chit-chat because what the professional is doing takes time.

Without choosing to, I was hearing what everyone was up to this past weekend. I was learning about some bad blood between other tattoo artists or shops. And I was learning about who was getting what where and why (I was lying near a guy who was busy getting a tattoo of a snake head on one of his calves).

There I was, I’m not proud to share, in full judgment mode. I thought, “What these people are talking about is so banal, stupid, and predictable.” I also thought versions of, “What’s wrong with these people that this is what they care about and think about and discuss?” It even crossed my mind, “fuck I hope they at least vote the ‘right’ way!” Yup. I was lying there, being an uppity white woman, too proper and interesting and righteous to be amongst these people.

How stupid. And how embarrassing to have that string of snap judgments in a row next to people I didn’t even know. Frankly, how embarrassing that those are thoughts I have at all.

That said, I softened over time. The artwork I chose meant the session was graduating from minutes into hours. The needle was traversing my inner arm tendons, so it was a particularly “spicy” experience—not like what I remember from parts of the body that are simply more meaty.

The longer I laid there, my eyes closed or fixated on a particular point on the ceiling (envision the ceiling staring you may find yourself doing at the dentist’s office) the more I needed to focus on relaxing. Which resulted in me hearing, and actually listening differently. There were 1-on-1 conversations between the artists and their clients, and also from time-to-time the conversation would meander into one big conversation across the whole room.

There was a particular moment when the motorcycle-riding snake head tattoo man apologized to his artist, “I’m sorry I keep twitching, man.” At which point I piped in, “You’re not the only one!” And we had a laugh. The whole room started talking about how weird it is that our nervous system is, in fact, all connected, and even though a tattoo may be happening on an arm, a leg starts to twitch. It felt humanizing. This wasn’t about masculine posturing of who has a higher ‘pain tolerance,’ it was about the universal experience of being inside bodies, which felt comforting.

By the time my two-hour session was done, and I was all bandaged up and given my aftercare instructions, I had several lovely conversations with my artist. I felt a lot of resonance and respect for this group of artists, all with an entrepreneurial spirit to make being a professional artist a successful living. They got to make their own hours and didn’t have to spend their professional lives tied to email or in back-to-back meetings. It was then that I clocked my own feelings of envy and jealousy. These folks were so talented that they could produce intricate, permanent art on-demand all while using a heavy tattoo gun that was vibrating for hours on end. Not to mention, they dealt with human, squirmy canvasses.

Near this particular community, I started out feeling so separate, other, and quite frankly “better than.” By the end of my experience near these people, I felt humbled and grateful for the reminder that my snap judgments are often both icky and wrong. Also, I “go with” more communities of people then I let myself believe.

The conundrum with community…Dr. Brené Brown shared that “if you look for ways you don’t belong, you’ll find them.” What we focus on grows. We can each double down on isolation, attach ourselves to a limiting belief that we are separate, and decide we don’t go with hardly anyone or any communities. I’ve been there. I’m there from time to time, even now.

But I am also here to say that by choosing to say “okay” (not even necessarily an enthusiastic “YES”) to opportunities to be in a community, I get to experience something larger than myself. I learn more about myself. I learn more about the rest of humanity. And I am buoyed by the energy, intention, and magic of people getting together for any united purpose – be that book writing, yoga outside, or cool new body art.

Remember, community can be temporary or long-lasting. The benefits can be glorious either way. Digital or in-person, planned or evanescent. Like you, it is likely that I will both resist and move towards community in equal measure. I am proud of each of us for choosing to wrestle with the demons of “I don’t belong,” “I don’t go here,” “these aren’t my people,” and stick around long enough to find out.

What community experiences are you craving? What community experiences do you notice yourself resisting? What kind of community experiences do you want to try before this summer is over?

I’m going to offer leaders an opportunity to create some new community this fall. Stay tuned at www.trinaolson.com for more.

Together,