I feel like so many of us have forgotten what it means to be in community. Many of us were never taught how to be in community at all. We grow up hearing messages about putting ourselves first, about self-care and independence, all while living in a society that values individualism over connection. We have been conditioned to believe we should handle everything alone, that needing support is weakness, that self-sufficiency is the ultimate goal. But what has this really given us other than more isolation, more loneliness, more distance from our own humanity?
And when we do find ourselves in community, we leave at the first feelings of discomfort. We abandon each other. We struggle to sit with discomfort, often mixing up activation, dysregulation, and discomfort and calling it harm. That does not mean harm does not happen in community, it does, but many of us were never taught how to be in community, how to navigate conflict, or how to repair relationships when harm does happen.
I recently attended a conflict resolution training, and so many of us were there trying to learn these things for the first time. We were figuring out how to apply conflict resolution in community spaces, workplaces, organizing efforts, intentional communities, and even just in our personal relationships. How do we be in community? How do we resolve conflict? How do we address harm?
Many of us are waking up to the reality that community care is not just important but essential. We need each other. We always have. But we do not know how to get from isolation to true interdependence. We do not know how to trust again. We do not know how to stay when things get hard.
So how do we build community? Where do we even begin? Maybe we begin by remembering that we were never meant to do this alone.