When we attempt to Build our Communities as Young Adults

Humans are social creatures who are psychologically wired to create connections. We want to function in groups because we cannot provide or achieve all that is needed for a well-rounded life by ourselves; we have a fundamental need to belong. This is where finding community and creating a community for one’s self becomes critical, and one of the reasons the COVID-19 pandemic is psychologically devastating to so many of us. Members of our communities are dying, being displaced, and we have been removed from the intrinsic communities formed by co-workers and classmates. Maintaining our communities suddenly takes a lot of work, and emotional isolation creeps up and removes our communities as we tire of Zoom Meetings and text messages. In part two of my Influencers blog series, I have been dissecting my old communities and discovering how they influenced the creation of my close friends and found family community as a young adult. How do we create our community, who gets in, who stays, who goes? How did I figure out my need for community?

Often our friends and community members become a part of our lives by circumstance or proximity. During childhood, when a group of peers is placed in a room with you—eight hours per day, five days per week for thirteen years—groups will form, and friendships will develop. Making friends is easy, right? Then, you go to summer camp, vacation bible study, youth community theatre, or swimming lessons. You have friends there because their parents sent them to these summer activities too. Then we get our first jobs—in my case, I worked primarily with schoolmates—we make friends there because we are spending hours and hours each week making tacos, cashiering at the gas station, or stocking shelves, together. Always together. Are these people who you consider your friends, people you would have chosen for your community if you had not been forced together? Does that matter?

The first time many of us are given a chance to curate our friend groups comes after secondary school. Those who attend a trade school, start to work right out of high school, or who attend university all must figure out how to build a community. I went to university right after high school, so those are the experiences I can speak to here. University subdivides people into an infinite number of groups that create pools of people one can choose as a predetermined community. There are dorm floors, clubs, majors, classes, study groups, learning communities, sports teams, radio stations. Take your pick, or choose a bunch. Either way, these are places we can find friends with little effort.

My attempts at finding a community:

Freshman year of college placed me in a few groups that set me up for tight communities and close friendships. I was a member of 2013’s Smart Start—an early move-in program run by the university’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion— where I moved into the dorms a week early and attended classes and activities with two dozen other students throughout the school. I lived in the Honors’ Learning Community with a few other members of the honors program. I lived in the dorms—communal bathrooms will cause bonding whether you like it or not— and I was a theatre major. When I went to university, I was one of three people from my graduating class to attend MSUM, so there was a piece of my old community there too. So many options and this is before we even consider classes or cafeteria lines that could form friendships. How do we choose? I initially threw myself into my Smart Start Community and my honors program community. Both of these communities were forged through us being stuck in the same place for long periods, and most of the honors and Smart Start people lived in my dorm building, so we were around each other and had similar things to complain about or people to talk about. In fact, my college boyfriend lived on my dorm floor. Would I have chosen him if he were not around all the time and interested in me? Probably not.

The first deliberate community choice that I remember being made in college happened when I ran into a high school classmate in the Student Union during orientation week. We were both surprised to see each other. We chatted a bit, but I was waiting for my friends, and she was sitting with her new college friends. We had considered each other close friends all through primary school and high school, but at that moment, we realized we were not those kids anymore. At first, I felt the pain and rejection of the situation but then realized that we were finding ourselves, and we might no longer be the slumber party, boy talk, complain about teachers, kind of friends anymore. That is okay. I went to her wedding a few years later, we see each other at reunions and are faithful “likers” on Instagram, and we are still friends, but she was not a part of my undergrad community.

Later on in college, I dropped the honors program because I wanted to graduate early, then I moved out of the dorms. My community became almost exclusively the University Theatre Department. One of the joys of studying and working in theatre is that no matter where you are or what company you work for, the interpersonal dynamics are similar. A cast party with college theatre artists will have people behaving exactly the same as a cast party with people in their fifties or sixties—except the alcohol is more expensive and the snacks are better—because we have the same passion. We choose our position in the industry because of who we are. Our casts and crews are selected by the directors or administration, and we suddenly spend hundreds of hours together over an incredibly short period of time. This is another community created by circumstance and proximity. The crucible of a production calendar will forge relationships. When you add the pressures of testing, grades, and group projects, a theatre major multiplies the potential for community building.

After I graduated from my bachelor’s program, I decided to pack up my entire life and move to Philadelphia, PA. I did not know anyone there, I did not really have a plan; I just knew it was where I needed to be at that moment in time. I told my boyfriend that I was moving, and he could come with me, or we could break up. I was ready to go alone. In the end, he joined me, but he did not participate in the world with me. At twenty years old, I was virtually alone in a city of 1.6 million people. This was when I realized the value of a community.

After eighteen days of being jobless and alone in Philadelphia, I was hired at The Philadelphia Shakespeare Theatre (Philly Shakes) as an Assistant Stage Manager for their 2016 productions of Macbeth and Twelfth Night. The dynamics of a theatre troupe were something I was familiar with, and every day I am grateful for the people who became my first found family in Philadelphia. The work was hard, the hours were long, and I was so incredibly poor, but I was not alone. These are the people who threw my 21st Birthday party and made Philadelphia home, and yet I still had not actually built this family. It was a community I was hired into. Then, I left Philadelphia the first time.

In the years between leaving Philadelphia and moving back to Philly in 2018, I was more alone than ever. I was still in a relationship with my college boyfriend, but we were unhappy and growing apart. I would spend holidays with friends from college or my family. For a while, we lived with my mother in her new town. I worked for theatres, news stations, event centers, department stores, and an escape room—all without a chosen community, no drinks after work, no hourlong phone calls, alone.

How do we create a community?

Each of the communities I have been a part of has affected me in profound ways, and they educate the community I find myself in today. Nobody is part of just one community. There are rings of intimacy and sincerity in communities. I have blog readers and work friends, I have college friends, I have colleagues, I have graduate school friends, I have my biological family, I have a found family, and many more. We are who we spend time with, overt and covert peer pressures are real, and humans do not want to be alone. Therefore our communities are essential, and why we must take care in choosing them.

How do we choose who to let into our most cherished communities? Do we let in the co-worker who remembers our coffee order? Do we keep our lab partners or the girl who watches our laundry when we run to the vending machine at the launder mat? The answer depends; yes, no, maybe, I do not know yet? Creating a community is one of the most important tasks of our lives, and yet no one can teach us how to do it. Movies and magazines have been showing me how to secure a husband for as long as I can remember, but the nuclear family is a relatively recent construct, and we yearn for communities that are more than just a spouse and 2.5 children.

An unexpectedly tricky part of building communities is not only choosing who to let into your inner circle but choosing who to remove. The latter difficulty is a skill that keeps us up at night. Deciding when to end a relationship or friendship is hard. It is hard because we want to be accepted, it is hard because we do not want to die alone, it is hard because change is scary. The friendships that fizzle out and grow apart are sad to lose, but the relationships that we choose to end cannot be summed up so easily.

I have an amazing biological family—who create an intrinsic community for me— but I want to end this blog talking about some of the communities I have built for myself.

The first community I built consists of a handful of friends from undergrad who I consider my family. They are people who knew me when I was running on 3 hours of sleep and drinking orange Mountain Dew to get through my 20 hour days. They include the first two apartment roommates I ever had, a brilliant writer, excellent road trip buddies, and one of the most amazing dancers I have ever seen. We have Zoom costume parties and get together for New Year’s Eve. They are people who have seen me at my worst and my best; they tell me, “I told you so,” when I make bad choices, and I pick them up when they need me. We are a family.

The second community is the one I built in Philadelphia. This community is not as homogenous as the first, but I know that each of these people is one of ” my people.” The first is a single mom who began as a co-worker at Philly Shakes. 2016

at the theatre was really hard on all of us, and she and I became very close through the theatrical crucible that I mentioned earlier in this piece. When I moved back to Philadelphia, I wasn’t working for the theatre, but I wanted to reconnect with my old community, and she was the first person who welcomed me back. In the last four and half years of our friendship, we have talked each other through some very ugly breakups. I have cared for her after emergency surgery, helped throw her daughter’s birthday party, attended Phillies games, driven to the airport, driven carpool, had birthday drinks, and so much more. She was added to my community through proximity the first time, but the second time we chose each other.

Then, there are my friends from graduate school. The next few members of my Philadelphia community were found through my master’s program at Drexel University. I met the first at orientation, she seemed a bit serious and uppity at the time, but we were at the same table. I got to know her a bit and left it at that. A couple of days later, I met a young woman in my program who lived up the street from me and offered her a ride home after a late-night fringe show. She expressed an interest in working in the same industry as the first woman I had met a few days ago. I introduced them. These two women became my friends very quickly for a few reasons. One, we seemed to be only people who had work experience before graduate school—that later turned out to be an incorrect impression. Two, we had all moved from out west to be there, and three, we genuinely seemed to like each other. Since our meeting, we have traveled to the Lodigaini Family home in Connecticut, had dinner with each other’s’ significant others, taken cemetery tours, and sent one of us back to Texas to work in auctions, just like she wanted that first day we met. I have hung mirrors, checked basements for ghosts, had countless dinners and happy hours with these women, and proofread more copy that I can remember.

I think the thing that creates my community is that we share. We share joys, we share hardship, we share bottles of wine and orders of fries. We can be exactly who we are at all times. I have always been quick to accept someone into my life. I was the first person to introduce myself to new kids in high school, and I can break the ice in any room, but the thing that lets people into my community is the ability to share in the chaos that is life. The first friend I made in grad school became my friend because he told me he did not know how to make potatoes. He was alone in a new country, nervous about starting school, and he did not know how to make potatoes. We became fast friends, I helped him through our grad program, and he kept a smile on my face. I wrote a blog a few months ago about being a helper, and I think that is where the basis for my community resides as well. Share your trials with me, and I will help where I can. Let me lean on you, and know that you are there. Life is invariably short, no matter how long our lives might be. I believe the need for community stems from a want to share our lives with people around us. Now, if only we could all figure out how to do that…

Part III: How People influence our place and Motivations Coming October 2020