Finding Community

I am a rock, I am an island.

And a rock feels no pain.

And an island never cries.

- - - Simon and Garfunkel

Back in 2016, I was feeling sad and isolated. I had a new writing project which usually fills me up with exciting anticipation. Not that they’re easy. My projects are always challenging. The empty page can be intimidating. It usually is. I feel the weight of creating something from nothing, but I also feel excited to see where it will go and how it will all turn out.

Not this time. I felt sad and lonely and didn’t know what was causing it. I wrote every day like I always did but something was missing. To quote a literary term, I felt like a dangling participle, an unresolved state of being that results in a sense of not belonging anywhere.

I thought about my friends whom I adored. I felt that I belonged with them but we didn’t see each other much. This was before Covid but still, we mostly talked on the phone and texted. I missed seeing my friends in person. I missed seeing their body language. I missed feeling their warmth. I missed holding someone when they cried. I felt alone and lonely because I was missing a fundamental need: Community.

I wasn’t sure what to do. I didn’t belong to any groups or clubs that met in person. I didn’t know of any. My hobbies were things I did by myself. I used to go to a knitting store but the owner was always in a foul mood and she barked at everyone. I stopped going and I was alone a great deal of the time. I realized that if I was missing community, I needed to create it myself.

I decided to teach a writing class. I knew a great deal about writing. I had done more that a dozen books, some of them bestsellers, but I had never taught classes. I knew that great writers weren’t necessarily great teachers but I decided to give it a try and find out if I could do it. Maybe it would help cure my loneliness.

I thought about what I would teach. I wasn’t interested in grammar or spelling or parsing sentences. Who cared if their sentences were in order or their spelling was correct? I wanted to help them go deeper, to excavate what was inside of them and find a way to express it. What made them happy or sad? What made them peaceful or angry? How could they capture these things on the page? What would make them want to leave the class or stay? When they read their pieces out loud, could they overcome their fear of judgment?

The more I considered what I could teach, the more I realized that I couldn’t teach anyone to write. I don’t think that anyone one can teach someone else to be a good writer. What I could teach was how to remove the blocks that got in the way: The punishment of the inner critic. The fear of being a bad writer. Telling their secrets.

I made a list of some of the people I knew. They were friends who liked hearing what I was writing and had considered writing themselves. I created an email that described what I was offering. I didn’t expect anyone to sign up but I like to finish what I start and see if it’ll work. I pushed “Send” and got back to my work. Over the next half hour, people began signing up. I was surprised, gratified and scared. I remembered the first memoir I ever wrote for a legendary diva. I had no idea how to do it but I overrode my fear and figured it out. I did the same with my writing class.

When the doorbell rang and the first person arrived to take the class, I was terrified. Talking to groups of people was not something I liked. What if I couldn’t think of what to say? What if I couldn’t answer their questions? I turned to my acting skills and pretended I knew exactly what I was doing.

The class went well. I didn’t know how much I knew. When it was over, I felt relieved but I also felt filled up. It had been great to see all my friends in my living room and most of them signed up for the next one. During Covid, I took my class to Zoom. I was afraid it would lose the intimacy but it didn’t. We had established a sense of community and we all felt fortunate to have a place to deal with the isolation.

Recently, my students asked me to arrange a writing day at my house. I did it. Six of us made up a core group that had been returning to class since 2016 and some of them had never met each other in person. I watched everyone hugging each other and I couldn’t stop smiling. My fear of teaching had left me these fifteen years later. If I had let it stop me, what I was seeing would never have come to pass. Everyone loved each other and they had become such good writers over the years, I felt more like a guide and a fellow traveler than a teacher. I had done what I set out to do. I had created community and we all felt connected in a way that I had never dared to imagine.

We all need other people to make our lives feel safe and connected. We need to know that other people are feeling what we’re feeling, and they’re going through trials, just like we are. We need community around us to cut through the loneliness. To calm our anxiety. To lift us up from depression. To help us think clearly and to stop seeing ourselves as inadequate or ugly. I said to a friend who was caught in self-recrimination. “If only you could see yourself like I do.”

She needed a mirror and the reassurance that people who accepted her, just like she was. We all need our friends to be there for us, even if they annoy us. If you’re feeling isolated, you can change it. It takes some courage to face it, some imagination to create it, some devotion to finding meaning in your life, and some trust and belief in the people around you. And in yourself.

“The way you get meaning in your life is to devote yourself to loving others,

Devote yourself to your community around you,

And devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.”

Mitch Albom