There is a deep vulnerability in living closely with others. It entails being known and seen. Being seen not just when you’ve pulled yourself together and put on your out-in-the-world face, but seen when your buttons are pushed, your emotions activated, your energy low–that moment when your worst self has jostled their way into the driver’s seat and is doing donuts on the front lawn. And I can honestly say that when I first came to Dancing Rabbit this prospect was terrifying. Emeshe here, reflecting on knowing others and being known in community.
As a person who cares about being liked and thought well of, it was, and sometimes still is, very scary for me to think about people seeing my flaws. I am afraid of not belonging, afraid of losing my connection to others, and afraid that people seeing my imperfections will land me on the outside–alone. But the longer I live closely with others in community, the more I see that hiding the things I perceive to be my failings is not only unhelpful, but also unfeasible.
Anyone who has ever lived with other people–roommates, bunkmates, dormmates, even romantic partners and family–knows that no matter how delightful a person is, they will sometimes annoy, anger, sadden, or pain you. Intentional community is no different. When we come to know each other beyond a surface level we begin to see that people have shadows and this can evolve into an uncomfortable study in how we deal with imperfection. Do we condemn it when we perceive it in others? Do we flip between idealizing someone and demonizing them? Do we have grace for their mistakes? How do these orientations reflect our relationship to ourselves?
One time last year, I was stressed out, upset, and angry and wrote an email that hurt my friend’s feelings. He felt I had been unfair and assigned fault instead of inviting mutual problem-solving. When he told me this I was terrified to say the least. I was afraid of losing our friendship, and also, my own internal image of being a nice person who doesn’t hurt people’s feelings. In the following moments I watched myself hop on my internal teeter totter of good and bad, trying to assign right and wrong, oscillating between shame and blame. I am a bad person and a bad friend. How could I have done something so stupid? No. He’s the bad person and the bad friend. Why is he being so sensitive? And so on and so forth, moving from defensiveness to self-deprecation and back again. We agreed to talk about it more the next day.
For our dialogue, we sat on the dock of the swimming pond, the occasional plop of bullfrogs jumping into the water punctuating our sentences. He told me about how the email had impacted him and I listened. We talked about how we felt. I ended up apologizing for how my words had landed and we ended up in a fruitful discussion about how we wanted to work together to solve the problem we were facing. We came back onto the same page, but we had to be brave and humble enough to do the work. It took vulnerability from both of us.
What felt profound to me about that day was that I had made a mistake, yet I was held with grace. Someone had been angry with me and I didn’t lose my friendship with them. I wasn’t punished for being flawed, for being human. The fact that I had messed up, and the fact that my friend had the bravery to tell me about it actually brought us deeper into connection.
This, to me, is the true radical experiment of community. In a world where we so readily demonize others, is it still possible to meaningfully collaborate with each other as whole humans, embracing our shadows as well as our light?
Emeshe eats with the Ironweed kitchen co-op during the winter and loves cooking big pots of soup for her friends on the wood stove.