On traveling “unanchored” and discovering authentic community

As I reflect on community this week, I realize this blog has now grown to its own larger community of people — many of whom I now don’t know. Each time I get notified of another subscriber, I wonder “What brings this person here? How did they find us? What’s their story? What topics/questions do they want to explore?”

So, if you have some time, please reply back and introduce yourself! Would love to hear from all of you 🙂

***
These last few weeks, my life has felt a bit unrecognizable to me. Between hosting a POC artist performance at my house, co-hosting a writing workshop for activists, going to a Shabbat with my meditation group, celebrating Spring by posting up with my 8 housemates on our stoop, I’ve been surrounded in community and realizing how foreign it still feels to me, even as I aspire to it. It always feels new, and slightly uncomfortable, as if I still haven’t allowed myself to trust it.

Perhaps this is because growing up, my family and I became so used to being alone. My father’s side of the family all lived in Ecuador, and my mother’s side was spread throughout Mexico and the U.S. My brothers and I still have uncles we never met, and cousins we haven’t seen for years. As one of few Latinxs in our predominantly white, conservative neighborhood, community didn’t come easily outside of family either. My mother had a small circle of Mexican friends that lived farther away, and my father had a few buddies from playing tennis. But other than that, ours was generally an anti-social household. We rarely hosted dinners or parties, and people rarely invited us to them either. Any other forms of “community” I observed mostly came in the form of country clubs or church — both of which felt exclusive and expensive.

This meant that on holidays, celebrations, weekends — it was always just the five of us. I spent most weekends of high school playing dominoes with my father, watching stand-up comedy with my brothers, going for walks with my mother,. During many moments, I am grateful for the unique bond that created within us. We were our own five-person community. We were all we had.

But this week, I’m realizing more than ever the downside of that upbringing: it never occurred to me that another community was something I needed.

Of course, for many years, having no expectation for community made me an ideal traveler. It felt natural to spend months in cities where I knew no more than a few people. In these cities, when I’d experience something difficult and have little “support,” that seemed normal too.

With my conservative, wealthy, white neighborhood as my only community in the past, I also could easily convince myself that “community” always ended up becoming oppressive anyway. For a long time, I equated community with conformity; you could only have access to it if you played by arbitrary rules. You have to act white. You have to straighten your hair. You have to make as much money as they do. You can’t be gay. With country clubs, sororities and church youth groups as my only examples, I believed community meant surrendering authenticity in exchange for some fake sense of belonging. Community was conditional upon agreeing to give something of myself up.

This mindset mostly worked during the nomadic years of my 20’s, but it reached a breaking point in my last months living in Cape Town. Few people knew back home how unhealthy I had become. I didn’t want to admit how lonely it could be living in this corner of the world. I didn’t want to admit how much I had struggled with my writing career or with making my own friends. I didn’t want to admit that my relationship was slowly falling apart. 

When I finally did admit to my boss the difficulty of this moment and my confusion of what to do next, he asked me:

“Who have you consulted in this?”

I paused and answered truthfully:

“No one.”

I realized then that perhaps I had taken my lifestyle a bit too far. Prioritizing my independence above all else had perhaps created an authentic life, yet one that had set me up for loneliness.

When I moved here to Oakland, I decided to finally put some energy into building community in a way I never had before. The result has mesmerized me. So many moments here — after coming home from a co-working date with my freelance friends, or leaving a meeting with my meditation group, or drinking coffee while chatting in the morning in my 8-person house — I think back to myself in Cape Town, and I think to myself: It would be so much harder to stay unhealthy here. So many people would notice.

I am learning that maybe that is my definition of community for now: having a group of people around you to notice. There is something to be said for a group of people watching you unfold each day. There is something to be said for mundane, repeated interactions with those people over and over again.

Even more miraculously, those groups of people here understand a very specific part of my soul that few other people ever could. In Oakland, I found Latinx people who hike, activists who meditate, a workplace full of queer people and a house full of freelance artists, and, in the end, so many travelers who also used Oakland as the right dose of “home” needed to keep their traveling spirits healthy and alive. All of them provide a specific kind of nourishment I never found before. Instead of feeling oppressive, community here feels liberating. It encourages and reinforces the most authentic parts of me, instead of requiring me to conform them away. 

Still, it takes vulnerability to begin to build and trust a community like this, to admit that I actually cannot just simply up and move somewhere else right now and be okay. Settling here, even for a short while, still feels like an emotional gamble: if I love this community so much, what happens if I lose it, or if it goes away? But at least for now, living abroad — for perhaps the first time — feels like it would come with a much bigger loss.

When I scrolled through dating apps at 25 years old in the Bay Area, I noticed almost every single person claimed they were “looking for adventure.” When I scroll through them now at 31 in the same place, I notice so many instead now say “looking for community.” This seems telling of my trajectory too (perhaps the ideal balance: “looking for community to seek adventure together”?).

Two years ago, I came across this passage written by James Baldwin in his novel “Giovanni’s Room” based on his time living as an expat in France. I had never found a passage that so precisely captured how I felt during those last months in Cape Town:

“I looked out into the narrow street, this strange, crooked corner where we sat, which was brazen now with the sunlight and heavy with people—people I would never understand. I ached abruptly, intolerably, with a longing to go home; not to that hotel, in one of the alleys of Paris, where the concierge barred the way with my unpaid bill; but home, home across the ocean, to things and people I knew and understood; to those things, those places, those people which I would always helplessly, and in whatever bitterness of spirit, love above all else. I had never realized such a sentiment in myself before, and it frightened me. I saw myself, sharply, as a wanderer, an adventurer, rocking through the world, unanchored.

I looked at Giovanni’s face, which did not help me. He belonged to this strange city, which did not belong to me.”

Reading it now, I realize: I spent so much of my 20’s entangled with people in cities that, in the end, did not belong to me. And though I know I will always see myself as an adventurer and a wanderer, I also know that I can no longer let myself travel as “unanchored” as I did during that time. 

I am grateful to read this passage now, in my house in Oakland, on the month that marks the longest (a whole year!) I have stayed under the same roof in the last seven years. For now, I have found my home across the ocean. I have found the things and people I know and understand. I am trying to allow myself to love them above all else.