Community

Give and Take

To be part of a relationship, you have to take part in it. Being a member of a community is a relationship with the community and some or all of the people in it.

You can not only give or only take: that’s giving or receiving charity. These build separation between you and the members of the community. When you only give, you create a hierarchy with you on top. You can care very much about the people you’re giving to, but they will be Othered as recipients, and they will be unable to care for you in return, and they will easily and surprisingly quickly abandon you if you become unable to give or they find a more bountiful giver.

When you only take, you form a strained bond if you form a bond at all. If you rely on the people giving, it’s easy to quickly resent them, especially if they can’t fulfill your exact needs. After all, they’re willing to give continuously with nothing in return, why can’t they put energy into doing it in ways that suit you better? And if someone else offers what you need but better, why not move on? Immediately. If you do try to care about them, how can you help them in return should they ever be in great need it if you never even learn how to fulfill their easiest needs? And if you don’t rely on them, what does it matter if they move on?

A healthy community’s members give and take to and from the group and each other. They allow the community to know and fulfill their own needs. They also give of their own resources, be those physical, emotional, intellectual, or other. Different communities and members give and take in different amounts, but never zero.

Risk

Being part of a community requires a level of vulnerability. It requires you to expose some of your needs. It requires you to trust others to use the resources you give. You can’t be part of a community you have no stake in, and you can’t join a community with no risk.

Some of the communities you join will be a net negative for you over the term of your participation, and you will have lost something when you choose to end your relationship. Sometimes, entirely due to factors outside of your own control, it will be a net loss and even painful. It may be honest mistakes of your own or of other members or even outside forces. It may be malicious.

But most community relationships will either be very short or a net positive. Dipping your toes into a new group can very quickly indicate whether or not it’s going to be a good fit. “Very quickly” can mean a single conversation or a couple months, but you generally learn a small lesson that helps you moving forward. You might experience mistakes, bad planning, unhealthy dynamics, or simply personality mismatches. Each one builds your skills for discerning groups moving forward, and as you build personal relationships with folks, you might learn to decipher communities that won’t fit you but will fit a friend.

The positive groups are where you get to focus more energy for a longer term. As you find and integrate into these places, you life is enriched, and other members’ lives enriched by you. A good community also has a varying lifespan like any other. As a whole it might only be a single event, or it could last a lifetime. Most communities that aren’t single events last between months and years. Only very rare communities will last a lifetime.

Building

Not every community can be entered or left easily, or even give you a choice of participation at all. Not every community’s members are friends. Within communities you have no choice but to participate in, such as the folks sharing an apartment building (at least until you could move out), we often see unhealthy communities where everyone gives the bare minimum (e.g., don’t trash the public areas) and no one takes more than the bare minimum (e.g., never uses the public areas).

Some communities are in their infancy, others have become unhealthy, and some are doing great. All communities need their members to help support and build them to become and stay healthy. Often putting effort into building the community directly falls onto a single person, and when that person burns out the community falls apart. Not every member must contribute to supporting the community structure, but for a community to be healthy, some part of the membership must support the structure. In some of the healthiest communities, all members support the structure by guiding each other in how to interact with the community in healthy ways. These members share advise and strategies throughout the group, and are rarely secretive.

In a community you have no choice but to participate in, it can be very beneficial to yourself and everyone else if you put some effort into making the community better, even if no-one else is. And with a little luck, your efforts will encourage others to do so as well.

Perfection

When building or judging a community, “perfect is the enemy of good” will very frequently ring true. If you leave every community that isn’t perfect, you will most likely leave every community period. There is no such thing as perfection, there will always been conflict eventually, and sometimes an otherwise “perfect” community will completely fall apart with the first conflict because it wasn’t build on a foundation of accepting that people are messy and have differences.