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

While the American Dream has never been an option for most members of some communities—queer folks, unmarried adults, Black folks, people who grow up poor, just to name a few—it’s also overpromised on the satisfaction, contentment, and happiness it delivers to people who do get their piece of it. The people winning at the American Dream are some di

Without accessible, celebrated models of what happiness, purpose, connection, and love look like outside the American Dream…

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Accountability is also about recognizing and accepting that we are necessary and wanted. It’s understanding that when we neglect ourselves, don’t care for ourselves, or are not working to live as our best selves, we are devaluing the time, energy, and care that our loved ones offer us.

Amoretta Morris, a wise woman I know who is rethinking philanthropy, wrote, “It’s okay to ask for help. In fact, by doing so, you are taking part in the divine circle of giving and receiving. While we often focus on what the request means for the asker/recipient, we should remember that giving can be transformative for the helper.… By not asking fo

Creating relationships and connection outside the arrangements that our current culture presents to us can be exciting and liberating. We get to be creative, coming up with new ways to understand our connections to others and new ways of connecting. We get to throw out what we’ve learned to want and discover what we actually want and need. We get t

The more successful we become, the harder it may be for us to connect with others not only because we’ve developed the habits of toxic individualism in order to succeed, but because we have rewired our brain.

a community of friends and neighbors that provide both safety net and spring board—support when things are hard, and celebration when things are especially good. We, in turn, provide those things for them.

By American Dream standards, a “good family” is an insular, nuclear family comprising a legally married man and woman raising biological children. This family is self-sufficient—and as such, functions as an independent…

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We can create more of what we all need when we are in community.