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

by Mia Birdsong

We stepped away from the sense that everything from time to money to food to space will run out at any second. We let go of the desire to be right, the fight to be seen and heard, the race toward better and more. We lingered, we listened, we inquired, we wondered. Our rhythm was not driving and relentless, but continually transforming and spacious. We had time to enjoy and learn, to rest and reflect, and to offer and receive care and consideration from one another.

We all seek belonging, and for very few of us, even the most hermitic, is that place completely separate from others. That means it’s something we must build together.

part of the economic justice work I’ve done has focused on shifting the public narrative around poverty and people who are poor. By using a combination of data and storytelling, I shine a light on the resilience, creativity, knowledge, and capability that exists in low-income communities. In doing this, I counter a narrative that blames people for being poor instead of recognizing both the assets of poor communities and the systemic barriers people are up against. One of the things I focus on is how people who are poor often leverage social capital to mitigate their experience of poverty. Or, to put it more plainly, how connected people help one another out.

This is a process of decolonization. Whether you are the descendants of colonizers or the colonized—or, like me, both—all of our peoples have experienced the loss of something essential to our liberated well-being. Whether that was taken from you or given away in the bargain to win power, it is loss.

“By not asking for help when you need it, you are blocking that flow.” This is one of the most liberating things I’ve ever read. We have a responsibility to each other to ask for help when we need it.

This idea was expressed beautifully in Desmond Tutu’s explanation of the South African concept of Ubuntu. He said, “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.

There are folks who, at great cost, just by insisting on existence and self-definition, have created more room for the rest of us to be expansive and self-determined in our identities and relationships. We owe a debt to those who have challenged the norms our culture has defined for us—norms that limit who we can be, how we present ourselves, how we love, who we call family.

Being on the receiving end of harmful oppressions is decidedly and specifically horrible. But wielding them has its own corrupting and denigrating impact on the imposer. This is important to understand, not because it makes those who hold privilege and power “victims” or somehow as equally harmed as those who experience racism, sexism, and classism. It’s important to understand because the work of dismantling systems of oppression that you benefit from isn’t altruistic work that just helps others; it is about your own liberation as well.

It is also some shamey, disingenuous bullshit to be told that if we practice deep breathing or detox from sugar, we’ll find some ease when the pain and exhaustion we’re feeling is mostly perpetuated by our culture. Your getting in your steps doesn’t make the hardship of experiencing systemic oppression or the energy suck of capitalism go away. But if the alternative is just succumbing to feeling like garbage, that’s also not an answer.

At our best, we don’t function based on reciprocation. It’s not about getting as much out of it as we put in. It’s that our output is transformed into a wholly different material that’s not possible to create alone, like we are spinning gold from straw or transforming paper cups into nebulae.

Shawna explains, we all have some “version of the story ‘I am not safe’ or ‘I am not loved’ or ‘there’s something wrong with me.’ These beliefs shape what we pay attention to. Our selective attention shapes our perceptions, our perceptions shape our experience, our experience reinforces our beliefs, and round and round we go.” Building self-awareness allows us to notice and reflect instead of just reacting.

Audre Lorde, “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.”

my no isn’t just a no, it is also a yes. When I’m clear enough to say no to what I don’t want, then I have more room to say yes to what I do want. I can’t have my true yeses without the nos. I want that for myself and the people I care about. I’m working on taking people’s nos as information for me about who they are and trying to be pleased that they are listening to themselves.

This is not about appropriating or gentrifying queerness. I don’t get to wrap a rainbow around my relationships while holding tightly to the benefits of being a cishet person, and not show up for queer people. 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. I have a responsibility to listen, to care for, to defend, to protect. I’m often doing it because I know it’s the right thing to do and it aligns with my values and beliefs. But more and more, I’m doing it because I see clearly that my freedom is tied to queer people’s freedom.

Commitment to another individual happens implicitly through biology and explicitly through marriage and adoption. But friendship, particularly adult friendship, has no such vow. It’s not that we don’t experience commitment inside our friendships. But we don’t often declare it. Through support and help, through engagement and participation, we extend our time and energy to people we are committed to. But the degree to which we are committed bumps up against that lack of clarity when we want a friendship to hold significance in our lives that looks closer to what our culture expects from romantic love. I wonder what we are missing out on by not clarifying the expectations and boundaries of our friendships and our hopes for those relationships.

While we can presume that our romantic-sexual relationships will include conversations to negotiate and work toward shared understanding, we expect a kind of effortlessness when it comes to friendships. This can prevent them from being as deep as they might be.

stepping outside these constructs is, like any process of undoing socialization, hard. We have to be vigilant. That is easier to do when you know what you’re aspiring to.

The only child in me is like, ‘I can entertain myself.’ But then I’m like, ‘Who do I call when I want to be sad?’ That’s the moment. I can be happy alone, it’s the sadness part. Who’s going to hold this space for me and not expect me to be joyful all the time?”

They are all family to me. I used to think that was about having people who mirrored some biological family relationship. Sometimes that works—Cat is my sister. But other times it doesn’t—I don’t think of Teddy as a brother or a cousin, but he’s someone I consider family.

“Aunties are the rule-breakers. When they come over to babysit, the fancy dishes come out, the kitchen becomes a playground, and screen time and bedtime extend. They go on adventures, take my kids to slightly inappropriate movies and shows, and they expose them to new music.”3 But, in my experience, aunties (and other nonparenting caretakers) also see children as whole people in a way that parents don’t. It means they can engage with kids as they really are and see what they are capable of. The mirror they hold up allows kids to think more deeply about who they are and extend themselves into the world more.

What Naomi, like so many of us, is asking for, is for people to be close enough to us that they can anticipate our needs, know what we want, and take their place in our lives. But it also means that many of us have to let go of some of our orientation toward privacy and seclusion.

There’s this experience that I want you to have—that feeling of whatever your identity is, however you hold all of those pieces—that you have opportunities to be in situations where each of those pieces finds a home. And that I don’t need to do that in every way. I just need to make sure that you have access to those experiences within our community.’”

Whether it was about marriage or parenting or location, for many of us, it doesn’t make sense to stick to the picture of family we came up with earlier in our lives. It might be that our desires change or that our circumstances just don’t line up with an old vision. Either way, many people told me that discarding the picture they had of how their lives would be—sometimes joyfully, sometimes through grieving—was necessary in order to fully embrace something better, or at least accept something different.

“When I was growing up, you couldn’t be tender; that was not a safe option. This is both a function of masculinity as it’s performed in our society, as well as the kind of neighborhoods and circumstances I grew up in.” One of the limitations of it is the exhaustion of having to have your guard up. “It’s like having to put on armor. I guess that’s the best metaphor that I could use. And I really do mean that metaphor very intentionally. Because it isn’t just the protective shield, but it also makes it harder for you to move around in the world. And it’s heavy, it’s a burden. I’ve worked really hard in my adulthood to (a) kind of drop some of that shit; but (b) make sure that I’m in circumstances where I don’t have to wear it in the first place. But it’s fucking exhausting. And it’s painful.” This shouldn’t be misunderstood as the I-have-it-so-hard-as-a-man backlash we see anytime men are called on their privilege or their abusive sexism and misogyny. Anthony speaks clearly to the way that patriarchy hollows the humanity out of men.

There was a lot of work to do, but incredible organization and planning combined with “enough bodies in the space doing work so that people can take rests whenever they want and don’t feel pressured to produce” meant that it was easy to step into a role and feel part of a supportive, powerful experience. Stella and I both felt a clear sense of purpose, a sense of being valued that encouraged our own generosity.

“Real security is not locking up more and more people,” scholar and activist Ruthie Wilson Gilmore told us. “Real security is knowing that you will have shelter, that you will have food, that you will have beauty in your life. That you have a future, that your family has a future.”

abolition is not just about the absence of policing and prisons. It’s about the presence of systems and cultures of support that actually create well-being. We know what those things are—physical and mental health care, housing, well-paying jobs, well-funded schools, time to spend with loves ones and do things that bring us joy and purpose, maybe even things like a guaranteed income.

Unlike the criminal legal system, which offers neither healing or accountability, transformative justice requires that everyone involved—the victim, the perpetrator, people who choose to be support people to either of them, people who witnessed the harm, and the facilitators—own the process of not only seeking justice, but defining what it looks like. Instead of abdicating the process to courts and lawyers, the community must do the work.

For humans, the idea that we would do labor or give up resources without direct benefit requires having faith that the universe will attend to our generosity. Our culture of winning, getting ahead, and zero-sum gains does not support this kind of mind-set. It’s more than the idea of self-sacrifice as a practice you benefit from because it makes you feel righteous or earns you points with your god. It’s also about recognizing that our collective survival depends on understanding that there is enough for all of us and we don’t need to hoard resources at the expense of others

we must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.”

As the stories in this book show us, there’s no singular way to do this, but it requires thought, deliberation, and courage. In my work life, I’ve learned to create strategic plans and steps, and benchmarks. That sounds counterintuitive to how we build connection, but maybe that’s part of what we need now—Saqib and Aisha’s spreadsheets, my sticky notes, Lawrence’s friendship zones, Homefulness’s manifesto. Calendars, reminders, and video messaging apps.