Community is a four letter word

If I’m honest with myself, I don’t like being in community.  Yet, if I had a top ten list of the words I’ve most said, written, or invoked - it’d be community.  Community builder might even be on my resume. It’d be rightfully there because I’ve been dedicated towards that practice throughout my lifetime. Yet, I’m not sure I’ve made peace or am at peace with being in community.  

Am I wanting what I can’t have? Or haven’t had? Or wish I had?

Webster’s diction describes community as: (noun) 1a: the people living in an area also; the area itself b: a group of living things that belong to one or more species and interact ecologically, c: a group of people with common interests, especially when living together.

Is sharing locality community? As an immigrant child who’s Dadi walked me two blocks to kindergarten, making sure my hair was nicely oiled and braided, I knew I was different. The only Indian. The only Farzana.  The only. It was a feeling of difference and disconnection. No one looked like me. “You live so close, why does your grandma walk you to school?”  asked my teacher.  I had no response. It’s a memory that has stuck with me.  Perhaps my earliest recollection of realizing I was operating within many cultures, and the one I had at home was in question. So why would this be my community? I didn’t feel part of the community.  

Was my community at home? No one there entirely understood me either. I was loved. That’s for sure. And I got spanked. I watched the dynamics of my Mom doing all the care work for a household of 12, in her 20s, in a country she came to through marriage.  I watched her cry when she couldn’t do so in front of others.  This wasn’t her community.  She was hurting without anyone to comfort her, besides me. Community shouldn’t hurt like that, right? This family wasn’t our community. 

Yet, I didn’t want to be alone. I believe in the powerful feeling of belonging. 

So for years and decades I’ve been in a complicated relationship with community. Political community, organizing community, identity-based community, values-based community, therapeutic community, cooperative community, civic community, spiritual community, cross-sector community, workout community, alumni community, leadership community, nonprofit community, social justice community, writers community….the list goes on.  

And here I am, the day after throwing my Dad a surprise 70th birthday (with family and friends he hasn’t spoken to in years), I just got off a call about how something I didn’t do impacted someone, a week after I uneasily expressed how I felt put on the spot at a meeting, and I’m fucking exhausted.  

Community is a four letter word. I hate it. I love it.  Whyyyyyyyy?

It’s hard.  

It engages with your identity.  And our identities evolve. For example, I identify as lowercase queer.  That lowercase is important to me. Because while I believe gender is a spectrum and love isn’t defined by genitalia or bound to heteronormative perceptions: I am cis-female and have been in a fifteen year relations with a cis-man. Does that mean I can’t be queer? I don’t think so and yet, I acknowledge the nuances and the limits of my experiences. Hence, the lowercase.  

Right about now, I’m worrying - I’m certain I’ve offended someone, used imprecise language, maybe shouldn’t have even claimed to be queer, realizing I didn’t mention race or class and how that plays into things. I know I didn’t interrogate the Indigenous genocide that’s linked to my immigrant settler identity. Or that by using those words I may have l made it seem like I’m not privileging the important work of Anti-Blackness. Or colorism. Or ablism. I should be incorporating an abolitionist theory, too.  This is my personal social justice spiral of shame.  Do you know this feeling?

How can I belong to communities that constantly question if I am down enough? At the same time, I encourage the questioning.  It comes from wanting to feel safe, seen, protected.  

We’re …We’re out of practice.  We’re grieving. We’re exhausted.  We need us. We need to be better understood. We will be misunderstood.  We need a we. 

Community isn’t perfect because we are not perfect.  

Where is the space to be imperfectly in community? Is it here - in my inner world - or could it be external? Is that too hard too imagine?

I am not the only only - am I? Nope. I know I’m not. I feel it in my bones and heart, where the ache lies, besides that joy of a friend teasing me so perfectly or the comment that lets me know I’m loved for doing that thing I always annoyingly do - it’s an acceptance of me: all of me. Especially those icky evolving parts. Because, “we are harmed and we harm”

I want that for you. For me. For us. 

Maybe it’s in between the formal communities, or within it, or as minutely magnificent as the protons and neutrons across atoms within everything.  

I’m still searching. 

Are you? 

In community,

Far