Community is everything

Everyday I struggle with the idea of community, my abandonment issues requiring contact with every person that loves me every morning lest I be forced to find value in myself. I struggle to live outside the present moment and so the ebb and flow of relationships put my heart into a consistent state of anxiety. When I dive deep into myself and embrace isolation, growth, and creation I find peace, I find confidence, but I do everything at max capacity and after a few days I forget the warmth of conversation. When I wade through the pool of friendship and ensure I am seeing a familiar face every evening after work I feel safe, at home, and comfortable, but I slowly start to forget myself, my goals, and ultimately I lose confidence in who I am. The clear solution is balance, the obvious answer to everything in life is ‘just do it in moderation’, but I have never known moderation.

My parents hated each other so strongly everyday until they burnt out and the pain in the eyes of myself and my siblings forced them apart. My first love was my best friend through every formative moment in my life until we burnt out too and couldn’t sustain a relationship. I started getting high when I was 13 and didn't take a break until I was 22. I only know full and complete commitment and breaking that pattern has pulled the capacity of my heart to its limits. But I will never stop trying, community is life and to contribute to community you must first contribute to yourself. In each of these examples the internal work was not done and so the pressure was shifted to a crutch, and as the pressure built the crutches crumbled.

My mother feels and loves deeper than anyone I’ve ever known, and was cursed to fall in love with a man that refused to acknowledge emotion existed. My father grew up through trauma that I don’t know I would have survived and learned to cope by shutting everything away and seeing the world as an equation. Without understanding themselves they never stood a chance at understanding each other, or maybe they did and chose to be ignorant. Regardless the internal work was not done and so they could not be fully present in the moment and truly see the people around them.

The first time I smoked weed was after a girl I thought I loved denied me. This unfortunately spiraled into a life long coping mechanism that I rely on to this day. Of course this is my fault and a conscious choice, but I want you to understand why I am who I am. When I experience the worst of the worst I don't often sit and process how I feel and what my next moves are. The loss of my first love and the perceived loss of my second were the first times I purposefully entered sobriety in the hopes of understanding myself better. Because of this when I am overwhelmed and don't have the solution to a problem yet I often end up shutting down until the solution appears, maintaining a constant state of cloudiness. The results of this are lost time, missed connections, and wasted opportunities for growth. Eventually the crutch breaks, I cant keep pushing off my responsibilities, and I must face it all at 10x the usual volume as it has been building inside me like soda in a shaken bottle.

Community is the most important thing in the world, but I, and I think many of us struggle with it because building a healthy and stable community starts with building a healthy and stable YOU first. We are all capable of it, we all deserve it, and we all have an obligation to humanity to heal, grow and pursue our highest potential. If you are reading this, I love you, I can't describe why yet, maybe I will write more on it in the future, but I love you, whoever you are, wherever you are at in life, I see your value, I see your potential, and it lies simply in your existence.