Community is About What We Are Willing to Feel

Not just what we do

✨ Thank you for joining the community craft conga line that is GROUP HUG! I am so glad you are here.✨

Sarah Anne Johnson / I purchased a postcard version of this from MASS MoCA in 2012 and it has been pinned above every working space since 💜

So I don’t know if you’ve heard of this thing called a new year or not, but one happened, and with it usually comes a lot of reflection and sighing while dragging the back of your hand gently across a cold window pane, which also happened, and then also making unfortunate eye contact with a squirrel perched up in a tree as it eats the small BODY of something (this is true! Squirrels occasionally eat meat, people! One more thing to worry about!) and recoiling in horror, losing your train of thought, which also, sadly, happened. 

But eventually I recalled my train of thought, and that train was chugging…around…the track…of this space I share with you today! Yes, GROUP HUG! I said it before, but sharing this writing and hearing what it sparks in you has been one of the deepest joys of my silly little life. 

As we begin another year, I thought it might be nice to revisit these reflections and share an emerging thesis of what GROUP HUG is all about with you. 

When I began writing GROUP HUG last April, I didn’t have the sharpest idea for what this project would be (like all things worth doing). There was just a glittering kernel: wanting to write about community building, the miracle of people coming together and the mystery of what keeps us apart. Wanting to do this writing with nuance and abstraction. Or as it’s been put a few times here: the ooey gooey. 

More specifically, there was a gut feeling about what I didn’t want to write about, which were how-to guides on building community. Think: templates for dinner parties and listicles of the perfect creative warm-ups and exercises to practice consensus. Even when writing about tried-and-true facilitative techniques or tricks to stoke participation, I was more drawn to explore why these were so effective versus how to execute these techniques perfectly. In the face of more and more products emerging on the premise they can solve the pain points for our loneliness and isolation, the Perfect Solving of It All felt well (and weirdly) covered. I also reject the idea that there’s just one way or just twenty ways to build community among people. It sort of feels like that misses the point.

As I kept writing, an invisible thesis began to surface. It is the reason my brain hummed when I read this quote that I’ve referenced a billion times from Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba:

“In organizing, we sometimes expect people, including ourselves, to shed the habits this society has embedded in us through sheer force of will, when in reality we all need practice.”

Everything in our lives has pulled us away from this practice and this release of the expectation. Or as my friend Christopher June shared with me the other day: capitalism has underdeveloped these skills in us.

I think of every time I’ve shown up to an organizing meeting and felt so anxious about the tension in the room that I didn’t want to return. Or followed a facilitation framework perfectly only to be overwhelmed by an unpredictable result with the people in the room. Or never showed up in the first place to a meet-up because I was nervous about who would be there and didn’t want to face the discomfort of that unknown. 

Again and again in community settings, it is these feelings – uncomfortable, confusing, painful, and most importantly unfamiliar – that seem to make or break myself and others around me.

We expect ourselves to show up perfectly formed and ready to engage, without baggage or sensitivities or complexity. Almost as if we’ll be perfected by the sheer act of being there in the first place.

It’s almost like the act of doing the thing – like hosting the party or joining a working group at our kids’ school or canvassing or creating group agreements or completing the conflict management certification – is where we expect our effort to end.

But these activities are all separate from the feelings needed to fully and sustainably participate: the courage, optimism, trust, love, intimacy, curiosity. The resilience to push through the inevitable feelings of fear, overwhelm, frustration, and hurt. The stamina to go through cycles of all of these feelings and more, again and again, and continue showing up even still.

I’m getting crisper on this thing I hope to explore with you here: what it takes to build community with other people is a way of being and nothing less. There is no quick fix. No one framework. No checklist of actions. Just skills we desperately need to practice, and feelings we need to get good with along the way.

I think back to my earlier examples of times I’ve experienced such discomfort around a feeling that I didn’t want to return. But of course the organizing space will be tense – the topics are heavy, the dialogue structures are unfamiliar, the simple act of being in a room with dozens of other people talking and listening across an (attempted) equal level of power isn’t something I often experience. Of course in facilitation there’s no predicting what people will actually say, and of course that feels scary. Of course it’s hard to show up to something social when I don’t know who will be there and I’m used to mostly known quantities in my friendships. 

I want to name these feelings. I want to give ourselves grace for having them. Because when I do that, I tend to have more awe for the miracle of what we’re trying to accomplish together in the first place, and more ease for the billions of feelings we might have and the billions of things that will go wrong along the way. 

It gives me the grace to show up again.

Feelings are also an essential signal; maybe the feelings we’re feeling are so intense because something is bad or unsafe for us to participate in. This is so important to know! And I find that when I am more tapped in to my feelings and practice showing up to stuff, I can better feel out the edges of what is uncomfortable and not for me vs. what is unfamiliar and very much worth doing.

At the bottom of everything written on GROUP HUG, you can expect to find this theme come up again and again. Not so much what we need to do to build community. But who do we need to be? What feelings and skills do we need to practice? How can we give ourselves grace and the benefit of awareness to see where we need to fill in our own gaps? 

To get something different in community, we need to be willing to feel something different. What are we willing to feel?

✨What if you shared this with someone you wanna talk about feelings with? ✨