On my shelf, there’s one particular book that I haven’t opened for years now. It’s called Big Friendship, by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman, and its contents is as punchy as its vivid yellow cover: relationships of all kinds, not just romantic, deserve investment, tender love and care, work. A friend can be as consequential to your sense of being, your survival, as a life partner — even though heteronormativity implores us to privilege the later.
I’ve been thinking lately about how it means to have friends, be in relationship, nurture and be nurtured by a community. We speak of community all the time. In bureaucratese,
we throw around community to refer to bounded groups of people who share a cultural identity (often but not always ethnic: the Vietnamese community! the Italian community!), or perhaps a certain postcode (this neighbourhood, that borough). Elsewhere, the community is defined through a prism of a specific institution or organisation, or even just shared purposes or causes or aims (I’m thinking religious, here).
Sometimes we also speak of Community with a capital C, in the same way we speak of Government with a capital G: in the abstract, and as a stand-in not for any particular group of people, but as the very principle that there is a people out there, who may not be organised into any specific form or structure, to which we are answerable.
Most of us belong to these forms of community, I suspect. Personally, I recognise myself in many, and feel politically invested in them, and have actively sought to foster my ties to them. And yet, at the most base level, at my core,
why do I still feel so unmoored?
Writing this to you whilst exhausted. Writing this to you because exhausted? Writing this to you because you are my community, and thus I am looking to you for replenishment?
I preach about community often — the importance of finding community and taking solace in community and resisting as part of a community, et cetera, et cetera. Community, for me, is political: solidarity across difference, allyship and accompliceship. And yet, I think it’s only just struck me recently that I take up a romanticised vision of community that obfuscates the material. Community organisers know this and have always known — that
it is the cooking for each other, the showing up for a chat and a shoulder to cry on, the gentle but firm calling-in and the “let me offer you a lift”, the mutual aid in all its myriad forms, that enables community to have political significance. It is these many ways in which people show up for each other, not just in spirit, not just symbolically, that build and solidify our interpersonal, coalitional alliances. Turning a series of I into a we takes real, bodily, cognitive labour.
What can I do for you? I’m serious — you can reply / message / text me.
Building upon Big Friendship, there is much to say about specifically about Adult Friendship. It is widely recognised (cite: various memes) that Adult Friendship is hard, to both initiate and then to maintain. You’re supposed to have made your friends during school and at dance class and then maybe in your university tutorials or clubs or parties . Mutual friends become your friends and that is how it snowballs, it grows,
such that, by the time you’re, like, a Real Grown Up, you’re all set. You might add a couple of work friends, but really, your life is too busy to do more than tend to what’s already in the garden — because, in fact, even just doing that is enough of a task. Time is scarce, as is money, as is (especially) energy. Years pass and maybe you just lose touch.
I feel really lucky, honestly, that it’s unfolded a little backwards for me. That I’ve managed to dull some of the paranoias that were my default schema as a child (they’re just being polite, they don’t really like you, they only see you as a spare friend), and encounter lots of people whom I’ve allowed to either prove these anxieties wrong,
or simply not important. I have bumped into old friends on the street, somebody I used to know, and discovered that they, in fact, do genuinely / sincerely / truly still have an interest in learning who I have become since we last met. I have met folks at conferences and in and around the crumbling institutions that are the academy or the public service,
who, as it turns out, are willing to embrace the possibility of communing in ways that are more than simply a LinkedIn connection / an intellectual exercise / professional encounters. A fucking delight, and surprise,
and it is compelling me to do more as a friend, and be more as a friend, and resist assuming that most Grown Ups have social cups that are already full, or that being friends once does not preclude becoming friends again, or friends anew.
Community is built. If it is a garden, then I must take up my hammer, sickle, trowel, watering can, rake, and put in the effort so that it can thrive ❤