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

by Mia Birdsong

I’ve come to understand that the things I want to do to be my best self and live my best life are also necessary for me to be in workable relationships with others. That means self-care, self-reflection, healing, and evolving.

Things like therapy, setting and keeping boundaries, and meditating fall under the heading of “self-care,” which are things that “help you find meaning, and support your growth and groundedness.”

While I was outspoken and would readily argue a perspective or interpretation in a class or work meeting, in my more personal relationships I tolerated a lot of bad sex, tedious interactions, flawed directions, and racist and sexist microaggressions. Unlearning feeling responsible for someone’s reaction to my “no” has been uncomfortable work. As a woman, I’ve been socialized to believe that what I want is secondary to what men want.

Since then, I’ve learned more about how much of Mariah’s time, mental energy, income, and other resources are directed at managing her diabetes. But it wasn’t until a recent conversation about the apocalypse (an increasingly common topic of discussion for me) that I began to realize how little I knew and how significant a resource drain it is.

Straight and/or cisgender folks don’t get to be the people who benefit most from the work queer people do to make themselves more free.

But more and more, I’m doing it because I see clearly that my freedom is tied to queer people’s freedom.

We Can’t Build Safety Without Community Healing, Repair, and Accountability

Ruthie’s words that day in 1998 introduced me to something I didn’t know I was looking for—another version of life that says my safety is grounded in positive things like care and love, and that I have a responsibility to not abandon others to struggle on their own.

Capitalism tells us that human beings—our bodies, our homes, our environment—are disposable. It tells us that a bottom line that extracts as much as it can from people while providing them with as little as it can is how you do business.

Creating community is creating culture—practice, ritual, social norms.

So, in my thirties, I stopped spending as much time in those spaces. I created a bubble for myself of relationships where the humanity and value and dignity of people who are Black and female and queer and any other host of marginalized identities was not a question.

These are the people who push me to heal and grow, and with whom I feel safe enough to do so. Living in my bubble is important for my well-being and it’s the place we practice world making—creating some version of the future world we want to live in now, in the present.

It’s like my people helped me discover my superpowers. It makes it possible for me to do the work I’m called to do with people outside my bubble—revealing our often hidden connections.