Building community is a joy (except when you don't want to, or you're tired, or you're in your own head, or other people have let you down one too many times...)

On dragging your feet (forward)

Everybody is telling you to build community right now. They are spreading the good word of Saturday dinners and stoop coffee. They want to teach you how to show up, or perhaps how to gather, artfully. Occasionally they point a finger. Can you handle a third space, they ask? Well then act like it. Stop bowling alone! Bowl with others! Invite Robert Putnam himself to go bowling! They are always saying this, the community yellers.

I am, of course, one of the yellers. I can not shut up about this community thing. And I do mean it, very much so. I really am trying to practice what I preach. Every week. Every day. Every moment. Except, that is, for when I’m not.

Oh God, I love community. I believe deeply that the only way out of this moment is by mending our bonds with one another. I want more community in my life. I want more of it in your life. And also, there are days (so many days) when I am whiny and petulant and would vastly prefer that I don’t have to put any effort into the puzzle that is other human beings.

To be clear, there are many others with far better reasons for shying away from community. There are people for whom reaching outward is dangerous or complicated or practically unfeasible. There are many for whom the barrier to community is disability or illness or poverty or extreme isolation, whose identities are under attack, whose bones are weary in ways that mine aren’t.

Comparatively, I have few decent excuses. I am busy, I suppose. I have to make a living, as we all do. My children do not raise themselves, nor do groceries first purchase and then arrange themselves in the manner of a nightly supper.

That’s not the reason why I drag my feet, though. I know that, were I to invest even more in community, some of my busyness would dissipate. Many hands make light work, etc., etc. If, for example, I were to successfully organize a writers’ collective, perhaps, many years down the road, it would be easier to make a living by typing at a keyboard. If everybody on my block shared meals and chores, I wouldn’t have to stare down the gauntlet of yet another day when it was up to me to feed my children.

Why, then, do I, a veteran preacher in the first church of community, have an unruly pile of unresponded to emails and text messages haunting me? Why do I RSVP “maybe” to many events and then not show up? Why have I not hosted the soup and pie supper of my dreams?

Oh God I wish I had a more profound reason. Mostly, it just feels like a lot. We feel like a lot— you and I together. I worry that I will host an event and nobody will show up, or that I will attend somebody else’s event and the conversation will be awkward. And I’m an extrovert, mind you! I enjoy social interactions. And yet, do you know how I spend my time before a new social event? Trying to think of questions that aren’t “so what do you do?” or “how about that weather?” Some days I can. Other days, it all feels so impossible. How many ways are there to say that days are that much easier when it’s sunny outside, or that “I’m doing fine, the fascism notwithstanding, haha.”

You know what’s wild? When I was a kid, my birthday parties were decently attended. And yet, I act as if I only have evidence to the contrary. I worry that, the next time I walk into an unfamiliar room or login to a new virtual space, I will be greeted by all the people who will really see through me. I am the world’s greatest tabulator of ways that others can and will reject me: by ghosting me, perhaps, or by showing up but leaving unimpressed. You know what everybody probably does, after an evening with me? They text all their own friends the eye rolling emoji. “Wait until you hear about this dork,” the texters no doubt type. “LOL what a loser.” The cell phone companies have to erect new towers, such is the volume of messages about how Garrett Bucks is “mid, at best.”

And that’s just the rejection piece of it. There are so many more reasons to give up on you all. Because yes it’s true: I love people. So much. But goodness we are pieces of work. We flake out on each other. We say “oh yeah, I promise to do this for you” and then fail to do so. We disappear from each other’s lives. We perseverate as to why others have disappeared from our lives.

Do you know what happens in community? People take advantage of it. They take more than they give. Sometimes they lie, or run scams. Sometimes they’re mean-spirited. Sometimes they’re dull.

We make it so hard to be loved, don’t we? We don’t listen well. We filibuster and hijack meetings. We re-litigate petty grievances and claw and scratch at one another, moving ego-first from interaction to interaction. We talk behind each other’s backs. We commit so many offenses— from the mildly annoying to the deeply abhorrent. Who has hurt you most in your life? It was likely somebody with whom you had a relationship, somebody who was supposed to be “community” to you in one way or another. We all have scars from past attempts at community, even those of us for whom life has been relatively easy.

I’m terrified that I will be let down by community, but I’m even more haunted by the ways I have let communities down. I am often surprised when somebody from my past reaches out to me— when they say “hey, I missed you” or join one of my classes or see me in the street and greet me with a hug. Don’t they know that, in my mind, I have failed them in the past?

Do you know how I feel right before I teach a new class? I’m a nervous wreck. I forget how much I loved every single one of my previous classes. There’s no room for those memories, what with the dread about how this next class will be the one where I finally receive some kind of cosmic comeuppance.

I say that I am tired, I am mostly just tired of being in my own head. I am overthinking it, I know. But surely I’m not the only one.

And yet, more often than not, I still try. Slowly but surely, I am reconnecting with old friends. My wife and I text new acquaintances who once offered us a polite “we should hang out” with an actual date and time to do so. A few weeks later, they return the favor, and, before we know it, those acquaintances become friends. I do offer the classes. I do show up to the meetings— some of them virtual, some of them here in town. I hang out afterwards, rejecting the easy out of slinking away without the burden of small talk. I respond to the invitation— to join a steering committee for my union, to teach the teen class at Quaker church, to coordinate the snack calendar for both kids’ soccer teams. I buy so many crates of Nature’s Bakery fig bars at Costco. I bowl (for real, and not alone). I hear about an ad hoc protest and I schlep downtown, a hastily scrawled sign in tow. I send some emails and texts en route. “Come too,” I say. I do that a few times and the people with the megaphones say “ok, now you’re on the list of people we can count on when we need to move quickly.”

I am trying. The voices have not disappeared, but I tell them, “listen, you can keep shouting, but I won’t let you stop me, at least not all the time.”

It is a joy to try. It is a joy even though many days the small talk is awkward and people do flake out and boundaries are not always respected. It is a joy even though protesting is soooo awkward. I will never not feel like a dummy, yelling into the void with my flimsy cardboard sign. It is a joy even though I am still not perfect at any of this. I am sometimes the one who flakes. I am not always charismatic, nor a great listener. I forget that Nutella has nuts in it (it’s in the name, damnit) whilst offering it to the kid on the soccer team with a nut allergy. The twelve year old, smarter than me, graciously declines, but still. I talk too loudly in coffee shops and show up late more often than I have any right to. I let people down. I apologize and, on my best days, try again.

I keep trying, in spite of myself.

I try because I don’t think there is another way. I believe that human beings are objects in motion, and when that motion takes us farther away from each other, there is only one outcome. Our lives will all get more precarious. We will trust each other less. The authoritarians and strong men will find more acolytes.

I try because they aren’t done trying to hurt us. I try because people around me are already losing their jobs, getting arrested, being forcefully disappeared. I don’t build community because anybody needs me to save them, but because times such as this call for all of us to travel in wider rather than narrower orbits.

I try because, for every time that another human being has let me down or made my life more difficult, there have been dozens of people who have shown up in my life as living, breathing miracles.

Have you ever lost yourself in laughter with another person? Have you ever cried because somebody else said or sang or drew or wrote something so beautiful? Have you ever been hugged so lovingly and authentically that you felt safe in that embrace? I try, because I have. Holy hell, I have.

I try because there’s nothing I’ve ever learned— about this world, about how to walk in it, about how (perhaps) to make it better— that I haven’t learned from other people.

I try because I am nervous every time I teach a class, but do you know how I feel, almost instantaneously, as soon as the first person logs on? Grateful. Unspeakably grateful. There they are! In spite of all their reasons for not being there! How about that?

Some days the spaces I offer are perfect and some days they are only ok, but every day they are gifts. How could I have wanted anything else than this? Another person in my life. Another voice that changes how I see the world. Another reason to keep going, to keep working, to keep shouting about how we all deserve something so much better than the unbearable heartbreak of the present tense.

The next morning, I might forget that feeling again. I might not remember that the last time I gathered with people—new people, old people, people I’ve known for years but who still surprise me in new ways— that it felt holy and beautiful and true. I might tell myself a story about how other people will only let me down, or how I am not worthy of their time. I might still drag my feet. But eventually, I will try once again. We will all try once again. We will whine and pout and wish it were easier. But we will still reach our hands out, because navigating this moment together may be tricky, but navigating it alone is unbearable.

End notes:

1. Part of building community is both giving and asking for help. And yes, I do feel sheepish that, in this space at least, the honest answer as to what help I need most is fairly predictable and boring. But it’s true, since this is my day job, the number one way you can help is either (a). becoming a paid subscriber if you can spare the apocryphal “cup of coffee a month” and/or (b). sharing my writing with others. Thanks, always, for considering.

2. Speaking of giving and receiving, you see that “love harder…” image up above? Stay tuned, paid subscribers, because coming up soon I’ll be offering some merch raffles for you all (or just straight up gifts for founding subscribers), and that just might be a shirt design…

3. I do love offering Barnraisers Project classes, and though I just finished one round, I’ll be back with an announcement about the next sessions (a mini cohort for folks thinking through how to sustain communities over time). If you’re on the interest list, you’ll hear as soon as those go live.

4. Very related to all of this: Have you read my brilliant friend

   Sarah Wheeler
   on how there’s not actually a guarantee that, if you build it, they will come (but that you should do so anyway)? oh goodness, please do.

5. Canadian friends: Congratulations on having survived an election season! I found myself watching far more of the CBC livestream last night than I thought I would, and then chasing that in the most predictable fashion (going down a deep rabbit hole about the history of the CCF).

6. This week’s “Musk and Trump don’t care about you” sticker in the wild comes from my hometown of Missoula, Montana. The person who affixed this sticker outside the Costco on Reserve Street didn’t know that I have a very specific community building memory connected to that place (shopping for groceries with my mom for the United Methodist teen retreats I helped plan in high school), but man if it didn’t make me smile to see it in that particular spot.

   I’m taking a break from sharing the link to the sticker request form, just because it’s my goal this week to finally work my way through the existing backlog (if you’re waiting for a sticker, I promise, it’s coming).