I have no thesis, but I want to ease back into a writing practice, so I will sit here again until my gut sensations drift up slowly into verbal consciousness.
I wrote a tweet two weeks ago about the life that I want, hoping to call it into existence with every detail I specified. I wrote it because I have reached like ten different crossroads all at once in the past two months, since my last public post, and they all came to a head earlier this month and compelled me to drop everything I was doing in Berlin, and fly to England. I've been wandering the southwest countryside since then.
I no longer feel like my calling is to nudge people closer to what is real!1 I still value authenticity and connection above almost all else. But I feel unusually inward-facing these days. I am not interested in connecting with just anyone. I am not currently interested in seducing anyone to visit places they would not naturally go: maybe I just want to go to my favorite places, and encounter the people who have joyously and independently chosen to go there also.
And that's what I am struggling with right now. I want to focus on a project with people deeply aligned with me, and build my life around that—energetically, but also materially: e.g. it would determine my choice of location and lifestyle; and ideally that's how I would meet my life partner. Typically the way people find this sort of deep alignment is by just following the thing that fascinates them most, and naturally forming a brotherhood with the others they find around them working towards the same goal.
But I am a highly contextual being. I can find myself deeply beautifully immersed in a project, in working with others; but for the most part, I get my energy from a social setting. I can't see a vision in a vacuum!2 I don't know where to focus my energy if none of my friends are focusing with me (and at the moment, my visions don’t align quite enough with those of most of my friends).
Or, sometimes I am drawn to things on my own, but then those tend to be solitary pursuits, or at least ones where I am not particularly interested in seeking out the associated community. I like fiber arts and ceramics and crafts, but it's not a strong filter for the kinds of people my mind loves to talk to (or the men I would want to date). I love learning languages and immersing myself in strange places, but the selection of people I can form deep relationships with in very foreign lands is slim.
I want to build things with my friends and future family. I want to build out a grounded community in a slow place, with some amount of interdependence and commitment. I had been doing social-fabric-weaving work in Berlin, but it felt too...loose, and superficial to me. Like playing dress-up; the stakes didn't feel very real (I think this is not necessarily inherently true, but it was true for me in particular, since I didn’t see myself doing those activities as enthusiastically if I had a partner or family). My friends and I were creating some of the things we wanted to see in the world, and the people in our circles were along for the ride, but at my breaking point it all felt tenuous, temporary, and even silly to me. I wondered, what am I doing here, if I want to have a family, if I want to meet a partner (the thing about meeting people through community organizing is that most of the people you meet will be happy you built something, and happy to engage with it since it's anyway there, but not themselves interested in building that same thing. I need a co-builder with an aligned vision!)? I don't even love Berlin. I want to homeschool my children; what am I doing rooting down in Germany, where that is illegal?
And yet—again—no other place feels right for me. The best friends I have ever made in my life are in Berlin. Anywhere bigger now feels overwhelming (and the people are energetically wrong for me); anywhere smaller and I worry about finding the right people (and how do you even narrow your search? There are a handful of Big places; there are infinite Small places).
For now I think my plan is to keep putting out the bat signal, in as many ways and places as I think of, no matter how unlikely. I will return to Berlin soon, and finish up my projects there, but keep an eye and an ear open to the outside world.
Actually, just a few weeks after writing that post, through the Give Your Gift program, I realized that my mission was actually about both authenticity and connection—I want what is real, but in service to connection. This is interesting and somewhat paradoxical because the two things can often come into tension, at their core.
Edit: see footnote #2
Again the theme of tension between authenticity and connection feels relevant here...and, oh shit! there is a tension between them, like when your authentic self does things other people don't like, but in many ways there is also a necessary interdependence between them?? Like, there's no such thing as my most authentic self in a vacuum...
as I had this realization I immediately tweeted about it here