Community Isn’t Just a TV Show

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the importance of authenticity for building community, so my brain has been in this community building mindset recently. One of the communities I interact with most regularly and find a huge sense of belonging and acceptance in are the people who love Disney.  Oddly, Disney was not something I have maintained a relationship with my entire life, and in my high school years through most of college I missed out on a ton of movies that I am now going back and rediscovering.  However, something I have noticed in these movies is the importance of community, and that the happy ending usually stems from sort of a reconciliation of someone with their community.  This is often seen with their family or their friends including the new friends they make along their journey.  We, the audience often get to watch the primary character of these movies struggle to feel a sense of purpose and belonging and through the plot devices of the movie we see them face the fact that they are who they are, and lean into that, because that becomes the only answer.  We then watch them triumphant in their storyline and see that those who cared about them love them just the way they are and never asked nor wanted them to be different, or if they had at one point wanted that, they suddenly come around seeing the error of their ways.  It is a very neat and tidy happy ending, and we love it because life is seldom that neat and tidy and our strife and conflicts are almost never resolved in 90 to 120 minutes.  But it is not just the happy ending that pulls us in, it is rather the reflection of our own journey.  While we may not be facing some of the huge things that these characters are facing, we are facing our own huge things and grappling with trying to find our way and figure out how to get from where we are, to where we need or want to be.

For most of us, one of the things that makes it really a challenge to face our own journey is the fear of loss of community.  This can happen theoretically for any number of reasons.  For clients I have worked with who are members of the LGBTQIA+ community, they often have grown up in households where they are told that it is wrong to be a member of the community which they very much are a part of, albeit often still in a very secretive sense.  They wind up facing this challenge of knowing who they are at their core, and wanting to be able to truly be themselves, but also believing that the people they have spent their lives with will shun them or disown them.  That is a really shitty spot to be in because neither of the paths feel like they will be fulfilling.  In fact, there is loss no matter where they go, either of their authenticity or of the people they love and hold most dearly.  If this was a movie, they could come out and their family would love and accept them, and it would be a wonderful experience with love and joy.  But sadly, that is not often how life pans out, and the decision to come out to a family can often create a huge rift and mean that person is now without their blood family, which means they must rebuild a community from scratch often.  Beyond the loss of family, these people also have to reckon with the fact that there are people in society who will also diminish them and tell them that they are wrong.  In a movie, they might make a stand to those people and wind up with support from their family that makes them feel empowered and that leads us right into the happy ending.

That sense of connection that we get from community is the thing we all need.  Humans are social creatures, and we just have varying degrees of need for socialization, which we see play out in the lives of the introvert versus the extrovert.  Some people need a couple of close people to see and talk to and that is enough, whereas others need a great many more and will recharge by being around people.  However, for both these groups finding those people will boil down to their sense of community.  If they lack that, they feel increasingly isolated and alone which is often that point we see in movies where the main character is at their lowest and are facing a crossroads.  When we think of people who live truly solitary existences we often see they struggle with other people or, depending on the circumstances of their isolation, they may struggle with reality.  Community is that thing that grounds us, supports us, and makes us feel whole and accepted.  Finding that is a crucial tool for survival.  Historically, that survival was avoiding the danger of the wilderness and assorted people who might come to deliver harm, but now it is primarily the sense of belonging and emotional support.

Thinking about community, we see people who will find community in a way that precludes other people.  I would argue that community should be inclusive and accessible because the connections we forge are about finding mutual senses of belonging with other people in their humanity.  Those who would close themselves off from others are in essence minimizing the humanity of another person or even group of people.  When we consider that, it takes a great deal of self-centeredness to assume you are somehow superior to someone else.  That robs us of connection and creates divisiveness and further isolation.  This is really antithetical to the idea of community and devolves into factions that seek to divide rather than unite.  If we are willing to isolate someone else then we are just as likely to experience and be subjected to that isolation ourselves.  That isolation means that we seek ways to make ourselves not feel that way, which, in a very ‘chicken versus the egg’ sort of way, has us seeking out some sense of community that allows us to feel accepted, at the exclusion of others.  We can go round and round and see how isolation versus connection works in terms of building a community, but the fact is that any isolation we create is detrimental.  There is a reason why in the United States most of us are familiar with the expression “divided we fall” because division is always the thing that will set us back and limit our ability to move forward.  So, again, why would we want to divide when we could unite?

“I would go most anywhere to find where I belong” is one of many lines that inspired this conversation today. For most of us, that is how deeply we hunger for a community. We may find it online, we may build it in person, or someone may introduce us to strangers who are a lot like us. Ultimately, the connection and the sense of community is a very human need and if we approach it in the right framework, we can find common ground with every other person on the planet because we all want to belong, feel loved, accepted, and like we matter. So today, extend that grace to yourself and to the people you meet along the way.