Can we build community if we don’t show up?

Give me a stoop or a porch gathering, ideally within walking distance from my home. That’s the vibe I need. (Photo by Carol M. Highsmith via LOC)

I’m not gonna lie, I don’t go out much. At least, not relative to what I think most “normal” people’s social lives are like. There are a million reasons for this. One big one is that I happen to be pretty content, most of the time, to be home, and I enjoy solitude. I’m also introverted, tend to be socially anxious (though not in all situations, and I’m pretty good at masking it), and I get sensory overwhelm very easily in noisy and/or crowded places. I’m also, like, aggressively diurnal. When the sun’s up, I’m up. When the sun starts to go down, I start to go down. All well and good in the summer; a bit harder in the winter. But also hard anytime of year, when we’re working all day, then the things that happen are happening at night, when I’d rather be in sweatpants zoning out because, well, I’m tired.

That said, I want to want to show up to things. I live in a community where there are a million things going on any given day; people organizing for causes, hosting events, having important meetings about important things, and just doing regular fun stuff. I don’t want to show up to all the things, but I want to show up to more than I do.

Community has become a buzzword these days. We’re all craving it. We all seem to suddenly understand that it’s important and many of us are lacking it in a meaningful way. But many of us are unpracticed in it. I’m still not sure I even totally understand what I mean when I talk about it. I know it’s more than just hanging out with friends, though that’s a part of it. I know it’s more than just working on something with people who mirror my politics exactly. But I’ve got so few real examples, it seems almost mythical. And we’ve been conditioned to believe that, whatever community is, it’s not as important as work, self-improvement, and nuclear family.

So - and I’ll just speak for myself here - the idea of building community is uncomfortable. I don’t really know how to do it. I’m fumbling in the dark, and truthfully, a bit scared to show up and really commit to it.

But I’m pretty sure it’s not possible to do community without showing up.

The stuff of social nightmares. For me, anyway. (Photo by Samuel Regan-Asante on Unsplash)

And I get the sense I’m not the only person who struggles to show up. For many of us, even if we try to find our things - the PTO or some committee or getting involved in a local elected official’s campaign - somehow it often doesn’t really energize us; sometimes it just leaves us feeling more depleted. In my case, I’ve been volunteering for years for our village’s environment commission. As the Chair, it means I’m required to join (or in my case, lead) two meetings a month, and invited to join at least four more monthly meetings related to sustainability in our village, hosted by different groups doing different work. I want to show up, but damn, six meetings a month is a lot. And the ones I do go to tend to be virtual, formal, and business-like. So, they feel like work, not community-building. And there’s that pervasive feeling that there’s always more to be done, always more meetings to go to.

I’ve spoken to many people who feel like they still haven’t recovered from Covid. I don’t feel like I have. My life has transformed dramatically since Covid, and now that I work fully remotely, I’m more isolated than ever. On top of that, so many of us are chronically stressed and sapped by our political crisis, the climate crisis, capitalism and caretaking in a society that hates both caretakers and people who need care.

We live in a culture that is built for and favors extroversion. But the vast majority of us don’t fall on either extreme of extroversion or introversion. Most people are a bit of both, and some of us have a harder time strengthening that social muscle if it’s been allowed to atrophy. Americans are spending significantly less time with friends than we used to, less than half as much as we did a decade ago. This is true in my life, for all the reasons you’d expect. Kids. Work. Obligations. Internet tricking me into thinking scrolling is socializing.

Yet somehow, we’re also over-scheduled. Our kids are over-scheduled. Like so many other adults I know, especially ones with kids, I deeply lament the fact that it never seems possible to just grab a coffee or do a backyard hang last minute. I wish for more: hey, are you around this afternoon for a walk? And less: let me check my calendar and we’ll get something on the books in six weeks.

So, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it would take to create opportunities to be in community that meet us where we’re at, with our depleted and tender and uncertain selves.

I recently took an overnight trip with some of my mom friends to Wisconsin. This now annual get-together is always such a cup-filler. We hang out in sweatpants, eat snacks all day, listen to 90s music, laugh a lot, talk about life. It’s the best. This year we were talking about how we wish we had a church to go to, but that’s not a church; a non-religious space to just get together once a week, catch up, and talk about the issues of the day. (I believe that’s what the internet is calls a “third space.”) A gathering that’s casual, low-stakes, and reliable.

It’s a bummer to plan something nobody shows up to. It’s a bummer to commit to something you don’t feel like you have the capacity for. How can we make it easier for ourselves? How can we make gathering more inclusive of the folks who already struggle to show up?

For me, it would be a gathering that happens during the day. Please, not at the end of the day when I’m exhausted. (So, a weekend thing, I guess.) It’s ideally outside, or at least not somewhere so loud that I can’t hear you speak to me, or I have to lose my voice to talk to you. Ideally, there’s a designated window, say 2-3 hours, and you can drop in and out as desired. Ideally it’s free. Kid-friendly is helpful.

And - this is very much just me speaking for myself - for the love of god, please don’t make me play a game.

The other thing I’m grappling with is that I may have to organize the gatherings I want to see. For me, that’s hard. Some of us are social hubs, from which gatherings seem to emanate; some of us are spokes. And some of us are spokes of spokes. I’m definitely not a hub; I don’t have a great track record with gatherings. It’s stressful and vulnerable to organize something and just cross your fingers that people show up. I’m realizing this is a moment where we need to both be gentle with ourselves and acknowledge how difficult it is to do something that is so foreign to many of us, and at the same time, we need to be brave.

In the past decade or so, there have been tremendous social shifts in our society. It’s pretty clear we spend a lot more time on our phones and a lot less time with other people. Many of us don’t have religious communities with whom we gather. Parenting styles have changed; our lives revolve around our kids and we schedule them in activities constantly, leaving less time for the kind of gathering that both fills our social cups and propels social movements.

I really, desperately want to be better at building and being in community. I really want to want to show up. But maybe the first step is acknowledging where so many of us are at, and creating gatherings that are simple and gentle enough to hold our lonely and tired souls. We’re going to need each other so much in the coming years, but we first need to remember how to need each other, and how to show up.

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