Welcome to Wandering Grace. I will be sharing essays exploring the themes of place and (be)longing every other Thursday, and bonus snapshots from the road on alternating Sundays. Read more about the project here.
The soundtrack for this essay is Danielle Ponder’s “Be Gentle” (which is also a track from last week’s bonus: a Resilience Playlist.)
Pre-S: I thought to preface this post with a glossary of words like introvert, community, autism, HSP…or at least what I mean when I use them — but this would probably be a fool’s errand. There was a season when Susan Cain’s Quiet was making the rounds, and people latched onto the concept of introversion to visibilize all sorts of intangible needs and desires, traits and proclivities. We’re now in a season of folks finding resonance in the ways neurodiversity names and normalizes all sorts of overlapping needs and desires, traits and proclivities. The words themselves inevitably mean different things to different people. I use them imprecisely, and their fluidity makes way for some interchangeability in my own life. If I had more time to edit this essay, I would ask of myself maybe 10% more precision. But I also think it’s okay to honor this messiness, this slipperiness, these attempts in communication.
It’s the first night away from home during my Healing Pilgrimage — I am in a basement apartment in the Mission District of San Francisco. This three-story railroad Victorian on Capp Street belongs to Mark, a mentor of a friend of mine. Mark lives upstairs with his husband, and it seems he regularly offers this space to those in transition: to my friend when she moved cross-country back to the west coast, to me for this residency, to his sister who’s about to be evicted from her Oakland spot after many many years.
In my journal, I write:
Tired. Should probably just let myself rest tonight and do more words processing tomorrow.
Noting the existential terror that nips at the edges of the frame when left to my own devices — what to do with myself.
Also thrilling.
And unfurled without others to respond to or sense into. (Why do I let my boundaries be defined in reaction to and thus BY other people?)
To be alone in the Mission is a novelty. I am used to living in a house with other people.
I am coming from a year of living with 6 adults, 1 teenager, 3 cats, 5 chickens, and many plant friends both indoors and out. It’s a cooperative living experiment we’ve co-created in a giant house in the suburbs with shared food, shared chores, and shared life. My body is constantly aware of who is around and when, especially since my current room is on the first floor just off the large living room and communal kitchen.
Before we moved into the house we would eventually name the Common Canary, I lived with a partner and many others who found refuge in our guest bedroom: visitors and artists-in-residence and friends-in-life-transitions. Before that, I had roommates throughout all my years in the Bay Area due to financial necessity. Before that, I was living with a different partner, in multiple apartments across multiple cities.
Actually, the last time I lived on my own was over a dozen years ago: this little four-plex in Austin after college. The landlady was old and friendly and let me choose a color for the living space since she was going to have to paint anyway — I chose a warm canary yellow. I loved that yellow kitchen where I really learned to cook for myself, that yellow living room with the fabric couch set on long-term loan from my boss at the time.
One of the questions I am asking on my Healing Pilgrimage is whether I want to live on my own again or whether I want to seek out another communal/cooperative living situation.1
I often tell introverts that one of the best parts of living communally is that it actually reduces the friction necessary to get our social needs met. When living solo in a place built for single-family homes, getting some quality time with a friend often requires: identifying the need, reaching out, waiting, planning, scheduling, waiting some more, and transit time to get there.
At the Common Canary, when I’m feeling lonely, I just walk out into the kitchen to see who else is around.
To be fair, I also spend a fair amount of time holed up in my room ‘hiding’ from others in order to recharge. I am learning to distinguish between simple introvert recharge time and re-regulation moments when my nervous system is out of whack (whether due to trauma, stress, or sensory overwhelm). Some of what I used to attribute to introvert recharge time, I am now seeing as autistic meltdown or burnout.
Even if it’s small and imperceptible, the hardest part of living communally is that it is really hard to relax completely into silence and solitude because the presence of other people in the house shapes how I move through my own life.
(Why do I let my boundaries be defined in reaction to and thus BY other people?)
Because, darling, boundaries are a form of active engagement between you and the world, between you and others in the world. When it’s joyful and mutual, it’s a game and a dance and play.
And sometimes when you’re tired, or when there’s not enough trust or capacity, or when you don’t trust yourself, you offset that responsibility onto rules or structures to do the work of boundaries FOR us. But sometimes that can take the emergence out of the possibilities, can take away the possibilities that we might be able to meet all of our needs with creativity and care.
***
A recurring conflict between Albert2 and me was around introverts and community. When I would bring up ideas to cater to the needs of introverts for community events, gatherings, or coop houses, they would become frustrated about people’s self-protective behaviors in the name of introversion. I can see now that they were questioning the blanket identity of introversion to push back against the fixed nature of existentialist identity politics — for the sake of allowing fluidity and behavior change.3 At the time, and in our patterned dynamic, I would hear their frustration as dismissal of the specific needs of the very real friends (and/or myself camouflaging my own needs underneath others’ needs) that I was trying to accommodate for, which made me double down on advocating for introverts as underdogs whose needs we should take into account.
And round and round we’d go.
It was exhausting.
In the book Divergent Mind, Jenara Nerenberg acknowledges this paradox and tension. The identity labels and medical diagnoses are unhelpful when they center an ableist default of how mind-bodies work, which positions difference as defective or problematic. In an ideal world, we recognize and honor and welcome in the wide diversity of ways our mind-bodies process and move through the world as unique gifts in a rich biosphere of complexity. We don’t need labels; we are free to be who we are as fully, complexly, beautifully, messily ourselves.
At the same time, we live in our current ableist society. Identity labels can help folks find community and build solidarity. Formal diagnoses are often necessary to access essential accommodations in systems, structures, and industries built for exclusion. The visibilizing of differences can break through the dominant narrative of what’s normal as we advocate for either increasing access to existing systems and/or overhauling them completely.4
When I think of introverts saying “I could never live in a coop,” when I think of all the times friends declined invitations in order to recharge or because of social anxieties or because they needed to prioritize solitude and staying away in the face of overwhelm, when I think of all who couldn’t or didn’t or weren’t able to make it to the events and gatherings we worked so hard to plan as gifts of community weaving, I feel angry and frustrated and griefy.
But not at them — not at the people or the individuals or my friends. I have deep compassion for every single no. I respect the boundaries and the no’s and their communication (whether direct or indirect). I empathize with every single reason given because I also need every single need expressed.
No: I’m angry at the cruelties of modernity that have us stewing in overwhelm and violence and grind for so much of our lives. I’m frustrated that we thus find ourselves spending so much effort, time, and burden on recovery as individuals in self-care mode instead of (or in addition to) being able to access and sink into collective care. I’m angry that there aren’t more community spaces designed with the needs and desires of those with high sensitivities in mind. I’m frustrated that those needs aren’t more often foregrounded as compasses for designing beautiful spaces that would end up working more elegantly for ALL of us. I feel frustrated about all the ways we have to constantly navigate the trade-off’s between getting our needs for self-connection met against the needs for community-connection met.
Which is to say I feel a deep well of grief around all of our (my) unmet needs.5
***
A week after I arrive in the Mission, I have a day when I wake up at a reasonable enough hour to get up but then decide to stay in bed because it’s warm and cozy under the comforters with the faux fireplace heater going in this cool dark basement apartment. I won’t tell you what time I slept until because that was the relief of it: No one else was there to witness me, so my inner monitor of the possible perception of others’ judgement of me was able to relax and turn off. Completely.
I sleep and sleep and sleep and sleep.
And it is freeing.
***
As both a highly-sensitive autistic introvert AND a highly-social community-minded connector, I am tired.
The wildfire season during the first year of this current global pandemic sunk me.
The most despiriting thing was seeing how much disaster capitalism concretized and expanded the infrastructures of isolation during pandemic, encroaching on every more territories of mutual aid and friendly asks that would otherwise make up the weave of community trust. Think: uber eats and amazon prime and instacart and tindr and zoom and lyft, commodifying and replacing cooking for each other and doing each other favors and introducing friends to friends and giving each other rides to the airport and calling each other up when we are bored.6 Our ability to stay in our individually-owned and nucleated hidey holes has increased. Our current system is more than happy to sell you ways to meet your needs via the marketplace (fueled by invisible-to-consumer labor), wrapped in the shiny promises of increasing efficiency and comfort and customization.
There was already ample friction to getting people out of their houses through traffic and concrete and outside their emotional comfort zones to risk community connection with friendly-but-not-guaranteed strangers even before 3+ years of pandemic protocols contracting everyone’s nervous systems and social circles.
Like, it was hard enough to recruit people to join a yogurt coop before pandemic. Post-pandemic, who has the energy to bother to convince people to do the thing that they don’t think they have the energy for, even though it really is deliciously so much better?7
I am scared and angry because I get it.
I get the bliss of closing this door and being in control of all the sounds and smells and temperature and lighting inside this 800 sq ft basement studio. I get the full body exhale of being in my own cocooned environment without any other persons’ sensations or nervous systems or behaviors or voices to make sense of and reconcile with my own inner and outer monologues. I get the tenderness of truly fully feeling my self again. A reset and a recharge.
I get it.
AND I know that once recharged, I’ll become antsy for connection again. And I’ll have either set up my life in a way where that will take more effort or less effort.8
I’m scared because I know that in this next season of my life, I will likely be chasing solitude via a structural solution of getting my own place. And I know that means I’ll be fighting against the structures of isolation built into our suburbs and cities and lives. I’m angry that I have to make that choice and that trade-off.
I’m scared that the community weaver part of me who is still in recovery from burnout won’t be able to do what she used to do so joyfully: to manifest the community support we need in this world when it’s scarce or missing or patchy or small.
Can I trust that I can access and rely on community and connection even if I’m not the one actively building it?
To all the community weavers out there: I see you. I love you. I appreciate you.
And I hope you can find some rest.
I won’t be able to figure this out on my own — and certainly not by the end of this one essay.
We’ll figure it out together. I know I’m not alone in the mission of community.
For today, I am closing this door, snuggling down, smuggling in some dreams, and doing whatever the heck I want for an indeterminate while.
The financial calculation of whether I can even afford rent in the Bay Area without roommates is what takes up most of my present-day anxious brain’s calculations and scenario planning. But I want to set that aside for now and consider what I actually want and need and value — to know that as a compass alongside my financial situation (and what I’m willing to make work to make life work for me).
Ex is too simplistic a term to encompass: former romantic life partner, co-dependent triggerer of moëbius strip trauma spirals, current housemate and friend, past artner-in-crime, co-creators and co-stewards of powerful poetic projects.
Queer: A Graphic History by Meg John Barker and Julie Scheele has a good introduction to identity politics, and their inherent limitations in their assimilationist bent.
The social model of disability further shifts the burden of responsibility away from the individual to society as a whole to create environments that celebrate differences. In the anthology Octavia’s Brood of speculative fiction, disability activist Mia Mingus’s short story “Hollow” takes place in such a thoughtfully-considered environment.
In their Decolonizing Non-Violent Communication workbook, Meenadchi writes that,
“Toxic anger is not anger.
It is, in truth, a graveyard of grief.
A mass gathering of unexpressed feelings and unmet needs, both intergenerational and individual.
Systemic conditions disallow impacted folx from expressing grief or heartache. Our movement spaces are filled with this toxicity, not because anyone wants to carry it, but because we have not been allowed sufficient time and space to grieve. As individuals and as a collective, our health and well-being depends upon our willingness to find space to do it anyways…
Mourning the unmet need is one practice for releasing toxic anger’s hold on us.”
"Status Quo, Except Online” a microplay from May 7, 2020 >_<
There’s an essay that I keep meaning to write about the ways that asking for help and thus being in each other’s debt is what actually makes a community a community, an antidote to hyper-individualism, and how hard that is to give up our freedom in exchange — based on Lewis Hyde’s The Gift and Amanda Palmer’s The Art of Asking, among other sources. I’ll just link those for now.
Yogurt Co-ops are about starting culture. You can also catfish people into joining by giving them samples of homemade yogurt made out of half-and-half, lol. Also, it’s not always about the calculus of “is it worth it”, but one 2-hour workshift for 6 months of bi-weekly homemade yogurt demonstrates the power of shared labor and is totally worth it, just sayin’.
There was one time in that canary yellow kitchen in that four-plex in Austin when I hadn’t interacted with any other human by choice for a whole weekend, and then found myself considering a craving to go to Target just to get a human fix in.
PS Many of the above book links are affiliate links through bookshop.org, where any book purchase will contribute some pennies to support my research and writing. I also love the library and trust your knowledge of the Dewey Decimal System to get you what you need in those locations!
PPS There is another essay that is about all the ways we can structurally design communal living to meet the needs of introverts+. I have some of those maps, too. Maybe that will come later on in this Wandering Grace series, when we return to the Common Canary in, oh, 5 weeks pilgrimage time aka 4 months substack time.