How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community

by Mia Birdsong

Without community, there is no liberation. —AUDRE LORDE

James Baldwin wrote, “The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.”

Accountability, as I mean it, is more about ourselves in the context of the collective. It’s seeing the ways we cause hurt or harm as actions that indicate we are not living in alignment with values that recognize our own humanity or the humanity of others. It’s about recognizing when our behavior is out of alignment with our best selves.

We need to reach for grace as we weave in and out of what is me and what is you, and what is us.

“It is to say, my humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours. We belong in a bundle of life. We say a person is a person through other persons. It is not I think therefore I am. It says rather: I am human because I belong, I participate, and I share.”12

People do not survive racism, xenophobia, gender discrimination, and poverty without developing extraordinary skills, systems, and practices of support. And in doing so, they carve a path for everyone else.

Real listening always brings people closer together. Trust that meaningful conversations can change your world. Rely on human goodness. Stay together.

Our ability to love and comfort is expanded by others’ grief, our own too-big-to-be-contained pain finds its freedom in others’ witnessing of it. “Yes,” they say, “feel it all. Don’t be afraid to expand too wide or fall too far. We see you so you can’t disappear.”

Suddenly, care of others is care of myself. Care of myself is care for others.

“The speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don’t miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And at last, you’ll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.”