How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community

Among the sixty-five-plus-and-dating set, “more older women are rejecting the downsides of the live-in relationship: the codependence, the daily tension within close quarters and the sacrifices made keeping a home, caregiving and doing the emotional legwork to keep their unions humming.”12

Self-care wasn’t enough; we wanted community care.

We are the only ones who can decide we will heal and grow, but it’s a collective process.

And it made me a little heartbroken to be newly aware of what’s possible but absent from the world I regularly live in.

As poet Brandon Wint wrote in a much-quoted social media post several years ago, “Not queer like gay; queer like escaping definition. Queer like some sort of fluidity and limitlessness all at once. Queer like a freedom too strange to be conquered. Queer like the fearlessness to imagine what love can look like, and to pursue it.”

We can’t fully know ourselves without other people.

“Just think about the way we talk about relationships now,” she said to me. “Significant others—significant means ‘sex partner.’ What a weirdly narrow notion of significant.”

Nor am I suggesting that everyone who experiences oppression does, or should be expected to, create beautiful, future-facing alternative societies.

It’s that our output is transformed into a wholly different material that’s not possible to create alone, like we are spinning gold from straw or transforming paper cups into nebulae. It’s only in an environment with others that this generative, multiplying power can be created.