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

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.

The American Dream is a clusterfuck of intersecting oppressions that function systemically and infect us individually.

a poorly developed sense of “enough,”

For decades, Black families have been described as “broken.”

“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.”

We are witnessing a shift right now. A stale version of the American Dream is crumbling, breaking apart, and being discarded as a new version emerges. People are widening the narrow roles they’ve been assigned. Many of us are refusing to feel guilty or shameful for not following convention when it comes to success or building family and community.

I’ve felt both agitated and excited about what might be possible. I’ve felt an energizing desire to be more explicit about the life I’m building. And I want to build that life in deep alignment with my best self’s values, and a vision of the world I want to help create.

James Baldwin wrote, “The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.”1 We all seek belonging, and for very few of us, even the most hermitic, is that place completely separate from others. That means it’s something we must build together.

While it’s open to anyone, it’s not for everyone.