trying to make community 

I sometimes feel like I am someone who is really rocked by the passage of time. Like it feels confusing and fast and slow all at once. I don’t know if this is unique or not but it has always felt particularly poignant. I am not someone who has had long time best friends or even long time friend groups. Even when I was a kid I often did not keep the friends from a previous school. I have always been someone who has people coming in and out of my life. I do not have a group of girlfriends from high school or even college I am still close friends with. 

I have made a lot of my decisions in my twenties for the sake of myself, for work or for an adventure. I do not regret this, I don’t think it’s particularly negative. However, in some ways it feels like it is shifting, like some part of this is changing in me. 

This year I am working on making a community for myself. I set out at the beginning of the year to prioritize people who I really care about. This was after having a particularly tough reckoning as I realized I no longer connected with old friends and some friends did not care for me in the way I thought they had. At the beginning of the year I set out to make training buddies that are women, and to become closer to some of the people in my community that I love. 

I want so bad to make Maine into a home as an adult. I want to feel like I have a community and support network here. And if I am honest, I don’t feel like I totally have that now. But I am closer than I was even a few months ago. But what I struggle with is the feeling of impermanence. I have felt like I had a budding community in other times, but it never came because something big changed. In New York I made a lot of friends through my job, then I was laid off. In college I, obviously,  made friends being involved in different clubs and activities, then covid happened. It feels sometimes hard to trust that a community I try to create will sustain. 

I guess this is all to say that sometimes the passing of time, the impermanence of relationships, sometimes feels like a gut wrenching reality.