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

by Mia Birdsong

James Baldwin wrote, “The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.”1

When we are oriented toward doing it ourselves and getting ours, we cut ourselves off from the kinds of relationships that can only be built when we allow ourselves to be open and generous.

The more successful we become, the harder it may be for us to connect with others not only because we’ve developed the habits of toxic individualism in order to succeed, but because we have rewired our brain.

This inability to be vulnerable by being our real, uneven selves creates distance inside us, and between us and others. But we long to be known, not just for our wins or talents or the good we do in the world, not just for how we overcome hardship, but for our pain and struggle while we are suffering, for our failures and shortcomings. We want to be known so we can be accepted and loved just because we are here. We all want to be enough.

“It’s okay to ask for help. In fact, by doing so, you are taking part in the divine circle of giving and receiving. While we often focus on what the request means for the asker/recipient, we should remember that giving can be transformative for the helper.… By not asking for help when you need it, you are blocking that flow.”10

Freedom was the idea that together we can ensure that we all have the things we need—love, food, shelter, safety. The way I’ve come to understand it, freedom is both an individual and collective endeavor—a multilayered process, not a static state of being. Being free is, in part, achieved through being connected.

Accountability is also about recognizing and accepting that we are necessary and wanted. It’s understanding that when we neglect ourselves, don’t care for ourselves, or are not working to live as our best selves, we are devaluing the time, energy, and care that our loved ones offer us.

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.

FAMILY AND COMMUNITY can and should be where we find belonging, care, and love. But they are often also the source of our deepest wounds and our greatest damage.

The American Dream is a clusterfuck of intersecting oppressions that function systemically and infect us individually. Capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy (all of which create offshoots like ableism, transphobia, ageism, and others) are embedded in the systems and institutions we all interact with—everything from housing to health care to media to jobs to education.1 But they are also embedded in each of us.

White supremacy harms people of color, and it also diminishes white people.2 I’m going to repeat this, because I want to be irrefutably clear, the harm experienced by the oppressors is not equivalent to the harm experienced by the oppressed.

The American Dream is white supremacy culture bound up with capitalism and patriarchy. In addition to espousing a belief that white people are superior to people of color, white supremacy is also a culture of rigidity, efficiency, more-is-better, ignorance-is-bliss, scarcity hoarding, binaries, and toxic individualism.

We can’t fully know ourselves without other people. At the 2018 National Rural Assembly, legendary activist Ruby Sales said, “It is in community and in relationship with others that we locate a self that we can never find being isolated. It is in community and in relationship with each other that we come to know the consciousness and the spirit of god that is in each of us.”

If we don’t ask for or accept help because of the independence we feel we must have, we don’t offer it because of the scarcity we feel.

“Queer is about removing labels and replacing them with a question. It is a side eye and a challenge back to mainstream society and politics. It says, ‘I don’t know the answer, but why are you asking the question?’”

Queering relationships is rejecting the restraints of convention, but it’s also liberatory truth-finding. It allows us to look at a relationship (and so many other things) stripped of preconceptions and ask, What is this really? What are the components? What is happening inside of it?

“platonic partners.”

“There’s labor involved in people articulating their needs sometimes that is exhausting when you’re already down.

The struggle of asking for help is amplified when the society you live in already judges you as a failure.