For most people, school is our first community. After school, it’s probably work. Whether you’re a shopkeeper, programmer, or lawyer, you often find community – looser or tighter – with people in your office or who do the same work nearby. Nurses might belong to a union while project managers or HR employees join their professional organizations. It seems obvious.
Looking back, I see that the colleges where I taught English over the years were communities, but that wasn’t obvious to me. I thought of other faculty as co-workers rather than relations. I knew they weren’t friends, though some did become dear friends. I wish I’d have seen them then as I now do – as members of my community, or one significant one. Maybe I would have paid more attention and valued those connections more. Maybe I’d have noticed how my office neighbors brightened my day, more so as I got to know them better and asked about their Cancun vacation or listened to their advice about my injured foot. I wish I’d have brought my home-made lemon bars sometimes, or had been enthusiastic about the department’s whale-watching excursion. Maybe, back then, I’d have discovered the importance of community. But the concept of community eluded me, as I imagine it might for others.
I knew that friendship was something to cherish and a powerful source of connection. It had a familiar and familial feel, like a natural bond with two or three people who formed islands we inhabited together and ranged across areas of intensity and playfulness, adventure and tenderness. Community is quite different but it offers something else that helps us thrive: a sense of belonging and security.
I think we’re fundamentally pack animals, like dogs or wolves or zebras needing to be part of a companion group that situates us inside its protective boundaries. It’s like a larger, social version of family (our original pack) that provides another powerful connection. It’s not the private, intimate and more binding friendship kind, but the kind that connects our public selves to others just enough to function as a unit with a shared purpose, place, time, or way of thinking. It’s this community connection with people who are neither strangers nor friends but something in between that can make us feel recognized, accepted, valued, and even – in their reflection and feedback – better defined. Community can feel like ballast, something that’s there despite any one person in it. In fact, it’s considered such an important component of happiness that an entire discipline within psychology is devoted to its study, and The Journal of Community Psychology to papers on the subject.
The importance of community finally dawned on me after living without it for too long. Like everyone, my social orientation got set in motion at home. I didn’t feel I belonged in my original pack. I wasn’t like my mother or my stepfather. My brother, who was a closer fit, is older and, of course, male. I believe that as I moved into one community after another that I didn’t recognize as such, I just reproduced that feeling of not belonging.
School didn’t seem like community. Although I had a random friend here and there, they were mostly other kids who hung back and tried to disappear. Aside from a couple of years when I was swept into junior high school popularity—and found it terribly uncomfortable—I didn’t have boyfriends, didn’t go to dances, and didn’t work on the school newspaper. Bottom line: I was a weirdo loner.
When I went to college, I requested my own room and got it. I went to classes. I studied. I did secretarial work at the law school for spending money. I wasn’t part of any group; I didn’t even understand that there were groups. But by the time I was a junior I was so worn down by my loneliness that I decided to join humanity. But I had to figure out how. First, I made a study of how students managed to find friends and party together, gather for protests, organize projects, and exhibit their artwork. Then I noticed the flyers advertising campus clubs. What a revelation. I investigated and ended up joining a group of political activists. I didn’t quite fit in, but it led to other groups where I did. When I auditioned and got a part in the college play, I had my first experience of community – of near-strangers working in concert to do something together. It was exciting and validating. By the opening-night party, I understood something of the value of community. But I would need more years to learn how to find my communities and cultivate my place in them.
That’s the challenge: Unless your family imprinted it on you, you have to become aware of the need for community and how to find yours. Which is where psychology comes in. It pays to begin with genuine self-inquiry about what you learned from your family about belonging and how you commonly situate yourself in groups. You might question how comfortable you are in them—and if the answer is “not very,” investigate further, maybe with help from a therapist.
Community requires practical considerations, too. Out in the world, community isn’t inevitable. And even when it can be, like at work, you can still feel like an outsider. As I discovered, finding community takes work and introspection. Religion certainly can offer community, but you have to be religious to join. Sports seem to create community for a lot of people, as do certain music groups. Whatever your interests, there are probably groups, like Rotary or dog rescuers or quilters, new parents, or yoga devotees. Once you work out what and how much community you want, you begin to see possibilities everywhere, and if you’re lucky, you also see the trust, camaraderie, warmth, and rootedness they bring to our lives.