Gathering Season
On learning to be a villager
I was mindlessly taptaptapping through Instagram stories last week when a video1 caught my attention for more than the allotted millisecond.
Initially, I paused because the woman in the video was doing one of my favorite things. She was mindfully peeling a fruit. In this case a persimmon, which I’ve never actually had, but it works with any peel-able fruit. Whenever I enjoy a tangerine or an orange, for example, I have started turning it into a mindfulness activity that challenges me to remove the entire peel in one continuous spiral. The speaker in this video had a paring knife and was working that persimmon peel like a master magician. So impressed, it took me roughly 30 seconds to tune into what she was sharing about. Community. A village. My attention shifted from peels to people.
The speaker (Minna Lee Jamison) was highlighting the individualist culture that is pushed here in America. Reflecting on the belief that this social orientation has damaged our ability to connect with and care for each other, in contrast to the large majority of other countries who value collectivism.
An individualist country values self-reliance and independence, highlighting personal gain and individual rights to achieve these things. This is an idea reinforced time and again, by things like embedding competition into achievement from a young age, reinforcing certain topics as shameful and to remain private, viewing things such as addiction/mental illness/disability as the individuals fault and personal responsibility, and the general “that’s not my problem” attitude that Jamison mentions.
Alternately, collectivist cultures emphasize interdependence and group loyalty, with values such as social cohesion and group harmony taking priority. While there are components of any social structure that can be damaging if misapplied and abused, it would seem this one does not breed the type of loneliness and isolation that is reportedly experienced by 1 in 5 adults in America2. There is a reason we all once thrived in villages and small communities. In fact Jamison’s grander point is the way we continue to crave that level of connectedness, but struggle to know what it means to participate within it. As she posits it, desiring “a village” without understanding what it means to be a villager.
My work as a therapist for diverse clients has offered a broader perspective of this dynamic. I have seen the ways that client’s collectivist cultures have shaped their lived experience. Some have shared about the enmeshment, the demands this inherited structure places on their energy and time. However they weigh this along side gratitude for the meaningful traditions they inherited, the feeling of never experiencing highs or lows truly alone, and the promise of a support system that is unwavering.
It strikes me that my opinion of this topic has changed drastically. In fact, a push for collectivism is contrary to the way my mind had conceptualized family for many years.
Growing up in a largely unwell, addicted household meant that the relationships were often transactional. It was painted that the world at large and everyone in it expected something from me, and that I could only ever trust myself to get my needs met. Moods in the house oscillated wildly…warm and funny, then cutting and sarcastic, intelligent and connecting, then silent and resentful, wise and generous, then irrational and explosive. These ever changing dynamics left me confused, and aching for safe connection. I discitingly remember one Thanksgiving where I positioned 7 year-old-me as the family mascot, attempting to garner a laugh to break the tension at the dinner table that was making my stomach hurt. This joke ended with me choking on a slab of ham by mistake and my dad yelling at me for fucking around. Ultimately, inconsistency and disconnection led to me adopting a self protective proclamation of independence, fortified by a society that elevates this as the goal.
“I don’t need anyone and no one needs me, I can take care of myself.”
And that worked, well enough anyway, for my late teens and early 20’s, until I realized how lonely it kept me. How my fear dressed as self-reliance held even the people I loved the most at arms length, unable to really reach me, even if they wanted to. And left me unable to feel really known, even to myself.
Slowly, with so much guidance and patience from people who understood family differently than I did, I let down my guard. Allowing others to care for me and my heart, and showing my natural proclivity for the very same, I became a woman deeply seeded in community, heavily reliant on the energy sources that are my groups. My writing group, my women’s group, my groups of friends, my groups of family, my social work group, my therapist group. There is nothing more soul filling than being in community, with like-minded, value aligned, open-hearted others. For me, it is the opposite of draining. Having a place to pour out the molten love that felt like it atrophied in resistance in my body for so many years is gratifying, it’s borderline selfish how glad it makes me.
You need to be picked up from the airport
You need someone to watch your baby so you can go to a wedding
Your car broke down and you could use a ride to work
You’re running late and your dog needs to be let out
Let me.
This is not a burden. I want to make your problems my problems. Not for them to plague and weigh me down (because they won’t, thats individualism talking babe) but so I can offer another set of hands to help juggle them easier.
Isn’t that what it is to care for another person? To go out of our way? To pick up medicine on the way home from an 8 hour work day because they’re sick, to spend an afternoon helping them move a new couch into their house. To do the thing because you love them, not because you enjoy the thing.
While I honor and value that we cannot and should not attempt to be everything for everyone all the time, boundaries in the extreme seem to have been weaponized us against our humanity, and in doing so, robbed us of sacred sacrifices. There is something to be said about showing love through making ourselves available at the expense of our own convenience.3
I had a moment last August where this shift in my perspective felt most stark. I was standing on the deck of our best friend’s house, the sun warm on my face, the smell of Old Bay wafting from the kitchen behind me, and a mismatch of people I love from different eras of my life gathered around. My closest friends were throwing me a birthday dinner, coming together with the specific intention of celebrating me.
Emotion caught in my throat as I realized, I had really done it, I had cultivated a perfectly loving life. Love that wasn’t warped, or complicated, or all together absent. I was surrounded by people who loved me, and for the first time, I didn’t have imposter syndrome that I didn’t deserve it. I wept in gratitude and fullness that night. Now that I’ve had it, I would not trade that feeling for anything.
This season of gathering can feel so raw for so many, including myself. May this serve as a reminder that we get to decide who our people are, how close we allow them to be, and how much of ourselves we give to them. But rather than the typical holiday plea for firmer boundaries (which are also valid), may this one instead be a warm invitation to the ones who need it. The scared ones, the stubborn ones, the strong-for-too-long ones. To open that door, just a little bit more, and allow safe others in.
I hope this season you find yourself smushed in a sandwich of the family you’ve chosen.
I love you,
Mar
Literally a Google search, but I buy it. If you do any research on it lmk 😉
I am privileged to have the time and resources to be able to dedicate energy like this to others. There is multi level systemic change required in order for mutual community support to really thrive.
*Icon art by Hannah Riordan*