What groups taught you how to group?
Prompts to explore community lineage
What was a community that shaped you? When I’ve asked this question in groups thinking about community building, two things happen. First, we get to hear about summer camps and pet rock clubs and annual cousin-only barbecues. Blurry pictures get passed around and once-padlocked secret handshakes get clumsily tried on by new hands. And while this is all happening, invisibly but definitely, we stop thinking of community as this abstracted thing. It is not something ‘out there’ for us or other people to wrangle like a lost dog, but a loving heat we recognize in our bodies. Sometimes this part is so good we don’t get to what we were meeting about.
These memories are important because whether we sense it or not, they don’t just shape who we become, but who we become in spaces with other people.
The way we host, the conflict we do or don’t tolerate, how we pitch in, how we speak up, if we expect everyone to wash their own dishes or scream if they even look at the sponge. It’s about etiquette and norms and culture, but it’s broader and more indelible than that – like relational genetics. It’s how our groups did it, and just how we believe things should be.
Like brown eyes and flat feet, these community lineages are visible in us even if we didn’t choose for them to be. I picked up my love of being there before the doors open from setting up chairs in a musty church auditorium. Group catharsis feels so necessary to me that I can get antsy at a book club. I am not very good at being on time for so many reasons, but have a distinctly different build towards this than friends who were shaped by sports communities.
As the dangling carrot of community life drifts more and more into the aspirational or precious, something far flung and extinct, we should feel comforted that we are each bringing something to the table whether we mean to or not: every community experience that’s shaped us so far.
And like any other lineage, we get to examine what it left us with. A way ‘things just work’ that is hard to shake? A gravitational yank towards the same group activity or scene again and again? Tendencies you wish you could drop (see: overdoing it while hosting) or can’t imagine ever dropping (see: always arriving early to help)?
I love imagining getting together and there actually being dozens of community histories in the room floating above the dozens of people, gently competing to shape the way things are through every one of us.
☻ ✹ COMMUNITY ORIGIN STORY PROMPTS FOR LIGHTHEARTED CONVERSATIONAL SPELUNKING THIS HOLIDAY SEASON
Best enjoyed while staring out the window of a train or around a table after most people have left the dinner
What was a community that shaped you? Maybe it was something from early in your childhood, before you were ten years old, or maybe it was something you experienced as recently as last week.
How would you all gather together? The rituals that brought you all together – Friday night dinners or annual talent shows or random picnics in the park.
What were the people there like? How would you describe them to someone who never met them? Could be something about the way they laughed, or the fact that they never showed up to a function without a warm Pyrex of some baked good.
How did they make you feel? What were you like as a result of being around all these people? Did you feel like a tight part of a unit, were you braver than you were in other spaces?
Where does this experience show up in your life now? How has it shaped the way you show up at parties, or come up as the first thing you google when you just moved somewhere new?
How do you wish this showed up in your life more (or less)? Is it a version of yourself you miss, a physical space that you wish existed but doesn’t (yet)? Alternatively: what do you wish you could drop, change up, unlearn? What could you do to make that real?
This exploration of utopian experiments, the Black Towns Movement, and modern day tourism by Ariana has been on my mind basically daily as has her AMAZING SYLLABUS !!
…also on the note of transparency, this public sales sheet from zine fests and art book fairs has me thinking about other topics for sharing otherwise disparate group experience
Party Kits, “a box of reusable tableware borrowed for an event and then returned to be used again.” !!!!!!!
Organized a Cranksgiving this weekend with pals and love how loosely interpreted the basic format can be (i.e. we didn’t do an alleycat but just did…extremely chill group rides to three grocery stores)
Enjoying We Make the Road by Walking
How i also feel about the price of community being annoyance
Aaaand it’s the co-op’s annual fundraiser if you feel so moved :) 10 MORE YEARS BABY!!!
🎵 I know that magic is an easy word to abuse, but I’ve tried other words, and what words can I use?
or simply click that ₊˚.⋆⁺₊💜₊˚.⋆⁺₊ at the top if you indeed liked it, we always appreciate that here at group hug hq!! love to you all
💸 If you enjoyed this, consider dropping a buck in the GROUP HUG hat! I’m so excited to try this new alternative to paid subscriptions (which have been paused for a while anyway) to pass support from this newsletter onto groups in my town which I clearly draw all of my inspiration from.
Oh, what an interesting post! I definitely inherited the way I show up from my mom. The first way is through chronic volunteering. My mom was very involved in Girl Guides, and was self employed so she was often available to be a parent chaperone on field trips. I am now the type of person who fills my evenings and weekends with volunteer roles and it enriches my life so much. I can't imagine life without it.
The other way, which I didn't really realize til I read your post, is in the way I hold smaller, more casual hang outs. For years and years, my mom hosted the "Friday Night Ladies" for Pizza Hut and Coors Light. I remember watching them clip coupons from the flyers around the holidays, dodging chocolate Easter eggs that they threw at my sisters and I, sitting on the front stoop and watching thunderstorms with them in the summer, and without fail being woken up late at night by their uproarious laughter. I've just recently established a weekly standing hang out with three other women and now I see the connection between the two. We usually meet at one of our houses and eat and gab and crack ourselves up. It's really a mirror of what my mom used to do with Karen and Carol (what a fun pair of names, hey?). I wonder if my children will grow up with memories of my friends and I sat around a table cackling, throwing snacks at the kids, and eating pizza.
lololol "dire need to lead others in song"