On COMMUNITY vs INTIMACY -
...what the difference is, and why we need both:
This month inside REWILDING has been orbiting around the Archetypal Mother. We’ve been doing a lot of active contemplation on what it means to call in and build community, how to be in reciprocity, and embodying our leadership.
Over the past few days, we’ve been having some discussion around the difference between community and intimacy, and how to get our needs met in both — without muddling them together.
I want to share it with you, because it’s useful as hell.
Particularly if you’ve been finding yourself feeling disheartened or exhausted by “community” recently.
Community and intimacy - how to make sure your needs are being met…
While there's obviously a buttload of overlap, building community with people is not the same as building intimacy with them.
As we're mobilising and organising, it's important we're clear on what the difference is, and what our needs are around both.
COMMUNITY is broad.
It basically means anyone who is on your team. My definition of community is anyone who is not a member of the billionare overlord class, and who is not outwardly and actively committed to being a super bigoted asshole.
(You don't have to have the same definition of community as me, but make sure you're differentiating between community and intimacy in your own understanding! This will help!)
Building community effectively is a whole lot of checking our egos at the door. Many many maaaaany people who are "on my team" will have wildly different views than I do on many different issues, they will have different visions of what "victory" means, they'll come from a huge variety of backgrounds (both cultural and eduational), and we are certainly not going to align on everything.
Story time! (humour me, it’s important):
When I was a kid, my first foray into front line activism was locking on against the coal seam gas miners in the town where I grew up. Coal seam gas mining was poisoning the water, many people could light a fire with what was coming out of their kitchen taps.
I was there with environmental groups, and our staunchest allies — the people who were standing shoulder to shoulder with us — were cattle farmers. These men (of course they were always men) were exactly what you'd expect from a fourth generation farmer from a very rural Australian town.
Definitely homophobic, probably pretty misogynistic, and a whole bunch of other stuff I definitely don't allow for in the people I build intimacy with. In short, these men were not my friends. But, in that moment, as a part of that movement, they were my comrades. We built community together.
Community is simply the absence of individualism. It does not necessarily connote intimacy.
When you're building community with your closest neighbours for example, it's not necessarily a space for sharing all of yourself super vulnerably and cultivating a lifelong bond of unbreakable friendship (although it might be, I truly wish that for you, but you're very lucky if this is your experience!)
It's simply, "what would it look like to build a relationship with this person that unplugs our dependency from the state, even slightly?"
It's recognising that the person living next to you is in the same boat, they're suffering the same cost of living crisis, the same climate crisis, and they're going to be experiencing the same stresses as you.
How can you stand in solidarity with them? What would it feel like to recognise that you're on the same team? How does that feeling translate into action?
Community is a recognition that the state actively benefits from our isolation. How can we disrupt that isolation, even slightly?
Go next door and introduce yourself to your neighbour. Bring them some apples. Ask them if they happen to have any carrots. Boom. You've just set the foundation for a reciprocity-based relationship that isn't dependant on the state at all. Build from there.
Remember, there's a difference between community and intimacy. Community is simply the absence of individualism and isolation.
Community building is about survival. It's about disruption. It's about safety in numbers. It's about a shift in worldview away from the hyper-individualism we're indoctrinated with.
Community is about meeting very basic needs. We need to stay alive. We need to protect each other. We need to build a world that isn't a threat to us.
Which brings us to...
INTIMACY is specific.
It's a relationship based on total trust and safety with another person. It's exclusive, it's often tight-knit, and it represents a if-not-fully-complete-then-pretty-damn-close alignment of values.
The people we're building intimacy with are the ones who see us in everything. We hide nothing from them. We express our uniqueness, our pain, our trauma, our brilliance, our everything - and we trust that we're going to be held in it.
Building intimacy is a slightly different kind of ego death.
Instead of a "this person is allowed to be fundamentally different from me for me to want to protect them from the full spectrum of colonial capitalist violence", it's more a "I'm learning that I'm allowed to not be perfect. How humiliating. I'm learning that this person I love enormously is also allowed to not be perfect. How frustrating."
The people we build intimacy with are special. They're usually rare. They're the ones we collapse with. They're the ones we grow with.
The people I build intimacy with really know me. I'm more than a comrade in the fight against fascism to them (not to degrade this type of relationship - it's still important!!). I'm a whole-ass complicated person.
This is where my discernment really comes into play.
I will not build intimacy with people who don't see me in precisely the ways I need to be seen to feel safe. I will absolutely build community with them, and stand in solidarity with them. I will fight to protect them. But I will not trust them. I will not open myself fully to them. This is the difference.
The needs we're meeting when we build intimacy are more existential (but just as vital). We need to be held. We need to be seen. We need to be loved.
Leftist movements cop a lot of well deserved flack for the infighting that goes on between different kinds of leftists. The meme is that we can never agree on anything and we can never properly organise because of it.
Culture war instead of class war, et cetera.
This happens because we mistakenly confuse building community with building intimacy.
The movement as a whole is not where we go to let ourselves be fully seen and felt. Subsections of it, sure. Specific people we meet along the way, absolutely.
We definitely need both - we need community AND intimacy.
But they are not the same.
You do not have to like everyone you build community with. That's building intimacy.
You do not have to agree with everything the people you're building community with believe. That's building intimacy.
You do not have to feel fully safe to be your whole entire complicated sacred beautiful self with every single ally in the fight against fascism for them to still be an ally. That's building intimacy.
If you're finding community building to be exhausting, difficult, and heart-breaking, ask yourself - which needs am I attempting to meet here?
Am I truly cultivating community, or am I attempting to build intimacy straight away?
Are my needs for intimacy being met?
Am I expecting the movement as a whole to meet all of my needs, even the ones that maybe don't belong there?
Am I projecting intimacy onto community, and hurting when I’m not being met the way I need to be?
Again, obviously there's a buttload of overlap here. Arguably, community is the first step to intimacy. It's the groundwork, in a lot of ways.
AND.
It's valuable all by itself.
It's valuable and vital as its own special section of the kinds of relationships you have.
Community is more than a means-to-an-end for getting your needs for intimacy met.
Feel into the difference. It'll really help, particularly if you're feeling like you're "accomplishing nothing" in your efforts to build community.
You're divesting from isolation and individualism. You're doing it. You're amazing. But remember, not every relationship you cultivate within community is going to meet your intimacy needs.
Be aware of the difference. It’ll help ❤️