It's not about you. Or me.

I'm wondering how to live more communally

I knew my newsletter would be late this week, as I’ve been existing in a surreal stress-sorrow-haze where time is irrelevant and most topics are uninteresting to me.

That is, the haze of having a very loved one who is very sick in the hospital.

When I was little, I used to pray that anything sad that happened during my life would happen in the winter, because I couldn’t fathom the experience of summertime suffering. It was just all wrong.

And, so far so good. Everything terrible I’ve been through has happened in the winter months. Lately when I walk the slick cold streets after dark, the collective melancholy of this season wraps around me.

It feels so much more appropriate to pass by tattered paper snowflakes and charity Christmas tree sales than backyard BBQ parties and packed beer gardens.

I read that when Emily Ratajkowski was little, she used to pray to be beautiful. If she and I teamed up, I’m pretty sure we could convince the whole world of the Power of Prayer.

I suppose I was conditioned early to view pain as a solitary act, conducted in your own home with your own sad music and your own bag of peanut butter M&Ms and your own Hulu subscription so you can watch every episode of Superstore while you avoid people for months.

But the pain of this month has been a fully communal experience, from the out-of-town visitors to the thoughtful emails. They assure me that many others are not only companions to this hard time, but immersed in it too.

It makes me sad for Little Mari that she expected to go through all pain alone, as evidenced by her plea to endure it during an already isolating season when her loneliness wouldn’t be so pronounced.

Adult Mari knows that pain isn’t an inside job but a communal effort, which leads me to my wondering of the week:

When it comes to making our lives easier and happier, why aren’t we talking more about community?

During a time when loneliness is considered an epidemic and every day I see a new essay on it’s so hard to make friends as an adult, we’ve somehow managed to come up with all sorts of ways to further keep ourselves from intimacy and community-building.

We have gobs of research on what makes us happy and healthy, and it’s our relationships. At the end of life, it’s our connections with people that matter most. (And yes I do consider a pet to be people.)

In Being Mortal, Atul Gawande observes that:

"Young people basically aspire to achieve, to get, to have. They're willing to delay gratification. When we become aware of the fragility of our life and we get older, we focus on a narrower group of friends and family. We become much more focused on intimacy and deeper relationships with folks and being connected to a few things that make us feel purposeful in the world. And that can change overnight."

So we know that our relationships are the investments most worth our time, but there are still tons of trendy ways to keep a distance from others.

Sure I’ll complain about a few!!

The expectation that healing happens alone

I’ve never even had TikTok and yet somehow I’ve managed to see a million TikToks about how It’s a red flag if he hasn’t gone to therapy or If they’re not in therapy, don’t get involved.

Therapy is great. I appreciate and need therapy.

But the problem with these Toks (?) is that they imply that a person should be fully formed, healed, and immediately forthcoming about their attachment style/diagnoses/traumas by the time you meet them, or they’re not worth even getting to know.

The message is: Healing happens alone, before entering into a relationship.

With that logic, therapy is only a means to become less maintenance for someone you’ve yet to meet, rather than an often joyous evolution of self-reflection and discovery.

A relationship is a micro-community in which two people also joyously evolve, participating in each other’s healing and enriching each other’s self-esteem.

It’s unrealistic and even dangerous to expect that the person you met on Hinge is going to arrive in front of their plate of bucatini, therapied to perfection, trauma-free, ready to embark on securely-attached romance. Then there’s no reason or opportunity for intimacy.

Intimacy is a KEY (the key! the vanilla extract!) ingredient in community-building, and we as an (apparently) lonely and friendless society could really use it.

And yet, it’s a suspiciously missing ingredient in SO many self-help TikToks, Instagram carousels, and even IRL interactions that I have personally witnessed.

Which leads me to….

Boundaries as an excuse to put up walls

Having personal boundaries keeps us happy and sane in our relationships, which is wonderful for nourishing our communities.

What is NOT nourishing is the sort of boundary-creating that is done entirely by one individual as a way to get out of intimacy.

My personal rule is: Boundaries require an honest, intimate conversation. Otherwise, it’s a wall. If you want to set up walls, go forth! Just don’t be shocked if your community is feeling a tad underfed, as though you’re only keeping people around who agree with you 100% and who you can’t go super deep with.

In a piece for the New Yorker last year called ‘The Rise of Therapy Speak,’ Katy Waldman wrote,

Online and in the letters sent to many a relationship-advice column or podcast, boundary drawing is often invoked to mean cutting people off. “But when we talk about boundaries in therapy,” [therapist Lori] Gottlieb explained, “it’s something that is really reflected upon and not extreme, and it’s all about interrelationality.”

Sometimes I feel a little nuts when I read about how lonely we are as individuals, and yet there’s so much public leeway—encouragement, even—to cancel plans, ghost, avoid, and drop contact all in the name of boundaries.

What does a community-nourishing boundary look like?

For a visual, I’ll borrow a friend’s image of the stone walls of Ireland snaking around the counties which serve as guidance for carriages and animals and plants to grow. The stone walls don’t have mortar, so you can see the sky through cracks in the rock. Little animals and bugs even make their homes in those hollows, so the boundaries become living and moving things themselves.

Creating separation in the Irish fields is useful for the farmers, helpful for the workers, and generous for the flora and fauna. The stones guide, teach, contain, and help navigate, all while nourishing the community by providing shelter for little creatures.

In contrast: Big ol’ walls seem…just rude! I’m thinking of a castle I visited in Portugal where a whole entire side of the structure was an enormous, windowless wall. What good is that! It’s like the architectural visual of ghosting. It makes one feel pathetic and banished, when there’s no way to know what’s happening on the other side. (Torture for a nosey snoop like me.)

I’ve been the recipient of this type of wall, and I know I’ve put up a few in the name of self-protection. But when the world is so starved for connection and intimacy, I wish I’d started collecting stones instead.

When sharing successes and failures causes isolation

A few confessions: I love gossip. I’m not immune to schadenfreude. I can be braggy. One time in 2013, Sonia Sotomayor told me I had good vocabulary, and do you think I have gone A SINGLE DAY since without boasting about that?? NOPE!

But enough about perfect me!

One thing about living in a hyper-individualistic society is that it becomes a good thing to be superior to others. Thus, we absorb collective messages about how to make ourselves seem better than others (even our dear friends), through gossip and bragging and other fun hobbies.

But when I catch myself boasting, I feel the icky side-effect of removing myself from intimacy with the person who has to listen to me prattle on about my posture for the zillionth time. And when someone brags to me, I struggle to be vulnerable with them. Both make me feel isolated from the other.

Now, if a friend were to share some good news with me in a way that brought me into that experience rather than isolated me from it, I’d be thrilled! And I hope that members of my community would be delighted to hear about my posture or vocabulary in a warm conversation wherein I wasn’t positioning myself above them like one of those ‘living statues’ who stand still on a little personal stage in Central Park.

Another way I’ve watched the need to be superior unfold is when someone makes a mistake. (I know, a quick way to feel better about yourself is to watch someone make a mistake but…let’s resist that!?) Relationships are perhaps most crucial when there’s a need for healing.

If we’re focused on intimate community-building, it can’t be up to the mistake-making individual to do the work by themselves in order to be accepted once again by their people.

Reconciliation, humility, grace, and transformation all happen with others…not on some distant island where if the person “thinks about what they’ve done” long enough, they’ll turn into an angel on earth.

I deeply believe that accountability is communal, and accomplishments can be communal too.

This week, I’m re-learning that pain is communal (otherwise, unbearable) and I’m wondering how to keep community-building at the top of my list when I consider how I intend to stumble and stride through 2023.

How are we all planning to nourish our relationships in the new year and beyond? How are you experiencing communal healing/pain/joy these days?