Community

Finding your people

If you interact enough with enough people who don’t get you, you might feel you can’t be got.

It’s discouraging to be consistently at another wavelength, as much as it’s dangerous to only be among people of your wavelength.

If life is only easy (a platonic ideal, sure) or constantly hard, maybe it’s not you, but context. Are people around you your Popeye’s spinach, or more smoke?

To find your people, you need to meet people, and explore, unfortunately.

I see people at events and press fairs who are frozen in a pitch or holding their invisibility pebble and not interacting.

Understandable. I was stuck there for, let’s see, *counting on fingers* *running out* *counting on knuckles* uuuuh, scads of decades.

That’s with good reason. People are scary as duck. Randomly venting, sniping, roman candles of lectures at anything. Not really present when and where they are, and with who they are with. That being here and now takes inner work. I’m working on it.

But who is their best self while in a crowd of unknowns? Most people seem to do best one-on-one if with someone they trust and an event is the antithesis of that situation.

We’ve all probably given or been at readings where the flow of energy between reader & audience is a magical feedback loop so everyone is energizing. And at ones where there’s as much fizz as a glass of week-old tap water. Who can say how or why. It’s not just speaker, not just audience. There’s a collective y-element too.

How to cultivate the y to better your chances? Not lifting facades and masks helps. Masks signals others to do their masking. Risking being shot down suggests others might come out of their foxholes. [Yep. Dropping stage and war analogies now.]

It’s been noted I can and will talk to anyone. I can chat, regardless of distance or time. I get energy from being around people but I renew energy in solitude. I go a little stir crazy without time for my own company. I need slow time, unstructured time. I’m punchy if I don’t give myself that. Punchy in ways others may not even notice but in ways that makes me not like myself.

Going out is a Thing. A good thing, probably. I’m a homebody. I like my familiar walls and woods. I can get too much in my own head so any nattering or deep dive into a subject will either change the energy level or act as white noise so I can’t hear myself so predominantly.

People as germ-carriers aside, people in person are good. But online is winner-winner, chicken dinner— brains can talk direct to brains without body language or visuals clogging the filters, just like in usenet days when everyone was a Robo326 or a BlueVacuum. No gender, no country, or cliques of front-ending who talks to whom how. It was bracing & there are corners of it still. Big talk I’m comfortable with, small talk pinches. And to funnel through small talk as an intiation ritual to every conversation can drive me bonkers. Online is continually media res so that’s delightful. A book without preface, superb.

[Aaand cat just stuck her head in a cereal box and fished out bran cereal. Let’s hope that wild card of the day gives no repercussions. Gad. Always something.]

[You think I was kidding? She’s taken another box.]

[Proactively redacting that cats are better than people.]

[On one hand it doesn’t matter. On the other hand…nope doesn’t matter there either.]

Life is a blink and a half long. May as well find it funny.

I’ve had 4 high-functioning days out of the last 20. Some days where I function for a few hours at low energy. It’s been a ride. My body has been on a rotating strike of its members and commonwealth partners. I could go on. Point being, there isn’t a wealth of time, for anyone.

You deal with the lay of the land as it is. Someone quipped we can’t silo ourselves to like-minds or the only person who perfectly overlaps would be one parts mechanic in Borneo.

What we can do is select our time for people who are kind, respectful, astute but forgiving, and curious and aim to be that person as well.

Problem with people is that each one has a full life, and get occupied, sick or die.

One has to be one’s own best friend. And when you do need extra connection? Sometimes we have a friend at hand.

Sometimes that thin tether to society at large is in text, social media or print. Perhaps it’s someone dead for decades which does not prevent connection. A chance to sit and be. Permission to exist.

[Aside: Somehow I came to live as if under tenuous redactable permission to exist. Shrinking myself. Expecting a blow to body or ego was childhood in summary. That was a long time ago. All that undercutting and dismissal, bullying and keeping me continually off balance without a safe place. I have since built havens and can decompress. Freeze and flight responses and not default anymore. There’s a distance travelled. ]

I trust few people. I can be myself despite but expect little. I tend to accept whatever I’m given socially, be agreeable, affable, reinforcing, or expect to be shut down or shut out. Pessimistic as that is, any cream is a bonus.

[I probably should segue between ideas but not gonna.]

Nothing is as relaxing as sustained concentration. Work is its own company. Unlike face to face conversations where responses are interpreted, weighed, collated and applied to new information, in poetry, reading or writing, you can just be while the poetry is. It’s like covert mind-melding. Intimate yet clinical or casual. Did I mention freeing?

Every book has a bit of that feeling of meeting in the equalizing blank face of font. Sure, typography is a clue, justification gives a read or cover aesthetic, paper weights, thickness, margins, gloss, sentence shapes, but largely it’s plugging into a brain through text. That’s freeing. That decluttering of identity to what is typed, that reach past circumstances of geography. That invisibility of reception so you can take your time absorbing, rereading, reflecting. It’s cut off from some of the complexity.

We can live in the time-sensitive, instant everything. You can research every node, build context from each thing mentioned into tangents to extract meaning. It can be a slow delve or intense as you want. Like people you meet once or twice a year for decades, building a picture in time lapse. And you can just not respond. Take it in, tuck it away or discard it. It can exist in a zone of ambiguous meaning, simultaneously in parallel mutually cancelling categories without being called out for not judging decisively in adjectives.

There’s something to be said for private, alone, not accountable. Perhaps more to be said for those soft connects, casual happy-to-see-yous, sharing anecdotes from the dy or path lived. And for deeper dives.