Community, in Theory

Day 160 – May 2, 2026

Community is one of those words that sounds beautiful until you actually need it. Then it gets real very fast. Because in theory, community is warm. Supportive. Nourishing. People showing up, meals appearing, understanding flowing naturally, everybody somehow already knowing how to hold one another without requiring an instruction manual and two weeks’ notice.

In theory.

In reality, community is more complicated than that.

Sometimes it’s there when you need it. Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it’s real in one direction and missing in another. Sometimes it surprises you. Sometimes it fails you so specifically that it changes the way you use the word forever.

That’s what I’ve been thinking about today.

What community even means once your relationship to safety has been altered. Once your body has learned too much. Once your trust no longer arrives to the room in a sundress and blind optimism. Once you’ve had to figure out, in the ugliest possible ways, who actually knows how to stay and who just likes the idea of being someone who would.

That changes the equation.

Because after what I’ve lived through, community is no longer abstract to me. It’s not a vibe. It’s not aesthetics. It’s not “I know a lot of people.” It is not social noise. It is not proximity mistaken for intimacy. It is certainly not the performance of concern by people who want the emotional reward of seeming supportive without ever putting any real weight into the structure.

No.

Community, for me, is simpler and stricter now. Who sees me correctly? Who lets me breathe? Who doesn’t ask me to become less real in order to remain welcome? Who can hold my pain without making it about their own reflection? Who understands that being warm to me now means something more serious than “nice”?

That’s community.

Or at least, that’s the beginning of it.

And the honest truth is, I still long for it in a way that feels embarrassingly normal. Not crowds. Not endless access. Not social abundance for the sake of optics. I mean real belonging. The kind where a place or a person or a room starts feeling less like something I have to earn and more like something I am allowed to inhabit.

That is still a longing in me.

Not because I’m naïve. Because I’m alive.

The thing about harm is that it can make belonging feel expensive. It can make community feel like a thing that exists in theory but arrives inconsistently in practice, especially when you know exactly how many people and systems are capable of hearing a woman’s pain and still somehow treating it like a logistical inconvenience instead of a moral emergency.

That leaves a mark.

It makes you skeptical. It makes you precise. It makes you very interested in the difference between being included and being held.

And I think I know that difference now.

I know it in my body.

I know the rooms where my shoulders soften. I know the people who do not trigger the tiny inner alarm that says perform, explain, shrink, translate. I know the presence that feels warm and the presence that only wants to be mistaken for it.

Roger, of course, believes community means anyone who greets him correctly, respects my importance, and does not radiate obvious villain energy through the pores.

His standards are sound.

And maybe that’s the thing. Community in theory is for everyone. Community in reality is for those who actually know how to hold the living thing once it’s in front of them.

That’s harder. That’s rarer. That’s worth more.

I don’t think I want bigger circles anymore.

I want truer ones.

People. Places. Moments. Even little neighborhood spaces that might not look like much from the outside but somehow carry an atmosphere my body doesn’t instinctively flinch from.

That feels important right now.

Because I think May may have something to say about community. Maybe not in theory. Maybe in the body. Maybe in the small ordinary places that turn out to matter much more than expected.

I’m listening.

Chaos in one hand. Grace in the other.

And me, no longer interested in the idea of belonging unless the real thing is in the room.