I don't want to like everyone in my community
Finding community as an adult has been a journey.
I grew up very isolated outside of school; I wasn’t connected to much — not to my neighborhood, not to a religious community, not to any group. I was home a lot, with my family and media. I didn’t know what belonging to people felt like.
When I was able to go away to college, I learned what it felt like to have a community for the first time. In college, community is easy. Everyone is within walking distance, you have some things in common that are easy to spot, a lot of people have kind of non-committal values, so it’s often hard to clash.
When I left, I was isolated again, living in a new city, without many resources. I found most of my replacement community online, which is, ultimately, kind of a terrible place to find it, at least in the 2010s, and probably now.
I met a lot of people I liked, and a lot of people I didn’t like, and that was suddenly a very different thing than it had been in college, or in my imagined sense of what a community is supposed to be. But I had traumas and so did basically everyone I tried to bond with at that time — it was really hard to connect or trust people all the way, and I think that lead to a lot of desire in these social groups to cut away anyone from the “community” who felt too challenging or hurtful.
In hindsight, that’s what they were — social groups. You can call any social group a community, and community does mean a lot of different things — but there is a type of community I crave and have never really experienced.
I realized around 2017 that most of the social groups I was in were not communities. I had a moment where I had to step back from all of my online communities, and because my blogging had mostly been meant to share with them, I stopped that too; I needed to rethink who I wanted to be with people and what a community actually means to me.
Now it’s been six years, and I haven’t found great replacements. Obviously a few of those years have been during a pandemic, so it’s not a surprise that faced with again online-or-nothing, I haven’t found much. It’s possible, but I think where I learned to look, there’s nothing I want anymore.
As I start to feel more comfortable expanding my social world again, and am rethinking my relationship to the internet in general — I am asking myself the same question I had in 2017 — what is a community? And where do I find it?
Here are some of my thoughts so far:
I don’t want to like everyone in my community. If I like everyone, that’s a social group, or a friend group; it’s not a community without diversity of just personalities, thoughts & opinions.
I want real diversity — for several years I got caught up in a lot of very oversimplified ideas about bringing our political selves into every personal relationship; I felt very afraid of hurting people whose experience I didn’t understand, and of people hurting me when they didn’t share my experience. I think that really damaged my ability to form deep connection with anyone, to engage with people I didn’t feel were like me; and really, that ultimately left me isolated with a variety of anxious intellectuals; and that isn’t diversity or an opportunity to help people. It was damaging to my ability to connect, to trust people to communicate with me, and to be around people that didn’t feel completely in tune with me. It isn’t possible to have community with people I’m afraid of hurting or hurting me at all times, just because we have different life experiences.
I think community requires trust and commitment. It doesn’t work to have fragile bonds holding a community together. So many people are coming from communities and families that hurt or rejected them and it makes sense to call loose bonds a community. When I was in that emotional place, it felt both soothing and terrifying to have these social groups that depended on agreement and similarity. But, they had very low trust and commitment, and so they ultimately weren’t sustainable.
People who make terrible friends & lovers still need community. People who just don’t fit in need community. Social groups can easily reject people for not being “likeable” to them specifically, and can with fervor reject people who don’t treat people very well. I think social groups where we like everyone are important, but I’d also like to exist in communities that are there for everyone, even if you kind of hate them.
I have a lot more searching and experimenting to do — if I have lists and theories about it, I haven’t actually done it yet. Before I can move on from over-intellectualizing about this though, I need to answer some questions.
What is step one to actually finding new people to talk to? How do I meet my neighbors? How much risk, trust, and commitment am I actually willing to go for? How much can I actually tolerate my own discomfort with people I don’t like, and how willing am I to be there for them?
At almost 32, I’m exploring what kind of community I want as I enter a new stage of my life; these thoughts are a start. I’m glad I can articulate better these days what hasn’t worked for me, and I hope in a few years I have some reflections to share on what I’ve finally experienced working well.
I would love to hear your thoughts on community. What have you experienced, what do you hope to experience? What worked for you, what hasn’t? What do you think of this essay?
Let me know in a comment or contact me through my website if you’d like to chat about it! https://www.michaelzzaki.com/contact/
Part of why I've stayed in the city I live in, even though I feel like it's constrained my life in some ways (can't find a long-term romantic partner, limited job opportunities, lack of some communities I'd like to connect with/participate in/learn from), is that it feels like the perfect size to have communities where you do reliably run into the same people over and over again, and most people you meet are somehow or other connected to other people you know, but you're also not absolutely stuck having close social ties to people you have bad history with.
We do lack some of the day-to-day closeness that would be true community (such as cultivating, cooking, and eating food together; maintaining regular and lasting traditions such as playing music and engaging in rituals together; making at least somewhat collective decisions about land use/relationship to land; doing chores together; telling our own stories more than we consume mass media) and of course we lack deep commitment to be in community with one another given the cultural and material circumstances we live under, but there are a wide variety of public events that happen regularly that I think form the backbone of community that has some of the attributes you're talking about: People can't just exile folks they don't like, and there aren't enough people who want to be involved in the kinds of community events I go to (queer, arts, activism, mutual aid, community gardening) to develop dogmatic cliques that exclude people who have sometimes even *very* different politics from one another.
Especially before the pandemic, the fabric of my social reality felt like I was part of a community in a lot of ways. E.g. I had a coworker who I knew from a bi support group who was dating a trans former coworker who was campaigning for mayor in a nearby town. My "straight" cis boyfriend ran into a girl he knew from scouts as a kid at a queer trans anarchist art house I took him to a party at. I met my roommate at an underground queer dance party where some friends I originally met through a combo of activism and online dating did performance art, and said roommate joined a Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women org group with me as allies, and recruited two Indigenous women who were friends of theirs who would go on to lead the group at different times. You go to a "new" activist group and meet someone who helped you recover from a traumatic event several years before. The techs at my eye doctor's are often really, authentically supportive of me as a trans person because one of their coworkers came out as a trans guy––and he happens to be someone I knew when I was active in animal rights many years ago. I'm hanging out with someone tonight who I met at a queer garden coop dance party last weekend, but in the meantime I found out that the old friend I'm organizing a memorial with does drag performances with one of their partners.
I could go on forever, but the point is that once you get out a little bit, there's this sense of abundance, that you can go out practically whenever you feel like it (or at least within a few days of getting the hankering) and meet people who you're connected to. You see people within the community getting cared for by other members of the community when they're in crisis a fair amount, and gentle gossip might point you to reach out to an old friend. I've decided to gently avoid certain people while being relieved to see that other community members are still willing to be friends with them––I know that their trauma-induced behaviors haven't alienated them entirely, but I also don't feel like I have to be the one to fill the gap. And I've been the one to stay friends with someone when another mutual friend decided they didn't want to. It feels good knowing that each of us has that choice and the social system as a whole still functions and still keeps people involved. It's also relieving to be able to see the same highly awkward/somewhat off-putting people show up at many different events (support groups, art events, etc) that are open to the public and know that they have community even if they struggle to make close friends. The loose nature of the social formation also means that if someone sees their abuser at an event, for example, they can inform their friends and have support in escaping (and the smaller semi-public groups like activist groups that are part of the larger formation can ban particular people without those people being completely cut off from all community).
I'm trying to grow from where I am by reaching out to people more and attending more events; talking about community and how it can fill more needs and not just put additional social burdens on top of days full of work and chores; doing fewer things alone that I would enjoy more if I did them with others; trying to develop the skill of giving people feedback more rather than just going quiet or fading out of a relationship; and valuing the ways I already exist in community with other people and the land. The reality is that we live in a capitalist context that tries very hard to destroy community and cut us off from one another, but there's still a lot to salvage and to build anew when we learn to see it.