Finding a Community You Love
Self-love from the outside in
Why is community important to self-love? This quote from bell hooks explains:
“Whether we learn how to love ourselves and others will depend on the presence of a loving environment. Self love cannot flourish in isolation.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
While one’s immediate environment (such as your home) is also a consideration, this is referring to the people we surround yourselves with.
To love and tend to our own needs we also require support. Especially on those days when the reality of adulting really starts to suck, who can help you steer through it?
That’s community: the people we know we can lean on. The people we offer the same to in their time of need. The people we trust.
The loneliest year of my life is when I realized that I had lost a lot of my friends. When I got sick in late 2016, I had to stop working. As an event planner, a significant portion of my social circle worked in the same industry, one I had been in for 12 years.
People I had traveled with, people I had celebrated milestones with, people whose children I’d watched grow up…if you’d told me that by 2017 I wouldn’t have but one or two of them in my life still, I would’ve been confused and appalled.
These were my friends! How could that possibly happen?
Unfortunately I hadn’t realized how fragile my relationships were. How much my position as a buyer of their services was really at the heart of our connections. The bleak realization that our relationships were transactional was heartbreaking.
I was merely a client, not an actual friend. It was business, not personal. Despite what we’d been through in 12 years.
I felt abandoned. Discarded. Isolated.
This was made even more painful by the fact that I was dealing with a difficult illness which to this day still has no known cause.
A friend of mine recently beat breast cancer. I can’t imagine dropping her like trash while she’s struggling through this fight.
The stark truth is that it happens. Sometimes people are only meant to be in your life for a season. And after my career season ended, so did those connections.
But that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth creating community. I didn’t start to get better and actually manage my illness until I joined a support group of people who I didn’t have to explain this to, who just let me show up as I could, people who were going through their own similar battles.
And that’s rough, right? You don’t immediately become close to new people like you were to those you’ve known for over a decade. But sometimes that’s how you build your support system, in baby steps.
Trust is earned over time.
It’s another reason Non-Mom May is so important to me. Yes, building community takes time, but it also requires commitment, and someone who’s willing to say “you’re welcome here.” I’m striving to be that person for the non-moms around me. The one you don’t have to explain your “non-momness” to.
No one should feel alone unless they want to be. There’s another bell hooks quote that rings true here:
“But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
While I don’t mind being alone, in the comfort of my own thoughts, I’m not good as a loner. I like the company of others. I like sharing experiences, creating memories. And I’m calling in the non-moms to do it with me.
Even though the sting of rejection is still there, I don’t let it hinder me from creating new friendships. I give people the benefit of the doubt until they don’t deserve it anymore.
So if you’ve been looking for a community, I hope you’ll join Non-Mom May over on Instagram. Or if you’re seeking something else, drop it in the comments and see who can offer what you need.
And stay tuned for a brand new La Vida Más Chévere de Childfree Latinas episode on Tuesday that sets the stage for building community with other people on the margins.
Till then, abrazos. Hugs.🫶
Related Reading:
Kicking Off Non-Mom May
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