Containers

Back in the early 2000s, in my late teens and early twenties, I rarely lived alone. I lived with my family, of course, when I was still young. Then I became a university student and lived in a dorm with dozens of other girls, mostly depressed, and several nuns, entirely repressed. When I, depressed, took a year off from university, I lived again with my family—two parents, two younger siblings—and then moved into a student housing co-op, where I lived with many, many people over the ensuing eight years.

The great gift of student co-op was that it was a container for a type of community for me. The resident makeup was decidedly mixed. Art weirdos shared a wall with silent computer engineering students, who shared a kitchen with Irish kids who could drink anyone under the table, who scrubbed the bathroom they shared with newly out lesbians, who left whiteboard doodles erased by depressed English majors. It wasn't all sparkles and sunshine: the houses were often dirty, the people often struggled with the typical afflictions of the early-20s crowd (addictions, mental health, heartbreak, student poverty, unemployment). But overall, the vibe was very much "young people living their own lives with each other."

For many years, I thought of myself as an introvert. I needed quite time, alone, to recharge. But compared to the vibrancy of early-20s co-op life, this new solo living felt—feels—muted. It feels colourless. 

I have that sense about a few different areas of my life. While there is literally no amount of money high enough to entice me back into an office, I do miss the camaraderie of office pals: the banter before and after meetings, the casual chit-chat as the clock winds down on Friday afternoon. Don't get me wrong, I also remember how excruciating those exchanges could be with people who were forever in the Colleagues column, who could never be moved over to the Friend-Shaped, Maybe? column. The ratio is better for restaurant or customer service jobs where subtly letting your freak flag fly out of sight of the Big Boss was a way of making lifelong friends. I know, I've done it. 

Likewise, high school and college were great containers for getting to know people. Give a kid a little bit of independence and a metric ton of hormones, and they will find a way to create social structures previously undreamed of. This doubled when I finally moved to an urban setting—Victoria, B.C. in the eighth grade—and I could do radical things like ride the city bus to the movie theatre and see a matinee presentation of The Beautician and the Beast on a date. Independence! Hormones! Public transportation! A witch's brew of possibilities. 

There has been a lot of online chatter about community lately, especially through the pandemic and beyond. The narrative has shifted in interesting ways: people are digging beyond the aesthetics of community, reminding each other that, if we want people to show up for us, we need to show up as well. If we want to host authentically, we need to be comfortable with people in our messy, imperfect, houses. Community is separate from friendship, but still deeply entwined in mutual respect; it's not a friend group, but people do want that too (hello, it's me, I'm people). Community is braided together with vulnerability: asking for help, offering it, showing our un-best selves. As the saying goes, if you want a village, you have to be a villager. 

But as I get older, the village seems to be getting sparser. I'm only 41, and I can feel the shift: friendships are more 1:1 than group-based these days, which means house parties are now more subdued afternoon affairs. I'm probably a scant year away from no longer walking my kiddo to school, leaving me without the afternoon check-in with my fellow-parents. I am currently unpartnered, and the dating pool in Stratford is...shallow? (In more ways than one.) (Ba-dum-CHA.) 

I think the twist is that we want more community, but we often want other people to provide it for us. And honestly, that's not unreasonable! It's hard to create containers from scratch. It's much, much easier to step into something pre-existing, like a school, or a summer camp, or housing co-op, or a job. I think it's one of the reasons that the Centre for Social Innovation got so much traction in its early days: plotting the future is hard work, and it's nice to have a buddy. 

Over and over, I find myself creating containers. I don't totally know why this happens, but it does! It feels almost comical at this point: I'll join a church and end up running a discussion group; I join a climate action group and end up running their family events. It's a very "if you build it, they will come" vibe. While it's work I like to do, it is work. And what's more, it take a long time to get traction for some of them. This winter, I hosted a "chips and dip salon," which was an invitation for folks to, uh, come and eat chips and dip in my house during the coldest months. When people came, it was in ones and twos, rather than the raucous event I might have imagined. The social container, the ritual of it, the form of it, is still being built. 

Here's the part that feels like whining but is wrapped in a thick cloak of good fortune. I am tired of holding containers. I want to step into someone else's community, some other person's events. I want to be welcomed with both arms, as I am, which is weird and needy, but also enthusiastic and warm and joyful. I want to walk, not at the front of the parade, but somewhere in the middle of the pack, surrounded and upheld. 

God, it feels weird to share that! It feels like I'm over-emphasizing my own place and role in what is, admittedly, a huge constellation of people who are making and doing community across my networks and places. I am not the sole convenor, and never have been. Like, tonight, my kiddo and I went to the library for their annual Boo Bash, and there were crafts and a zombie walk and an escape room, and it felt so nice just to step into something pre-planned and have a great time. 

But it does often feel like I'm reaching out, not being reached for. Is this a gap in friendship, or community? Or both? Is this the reality of nuclear family life, and the demands of late-stage capitalism? Is this just the state of things in our 40s, in the post-pandemic world, in the gig economy? Do other people feel this loss of the group, or does it feel like a relief to just be left alone with our spouses and kids? Am I just unpopular and unaware of it? (If I am, don't tell me.) Or is it just the human condition to feel slightly left out sometimes? 

There is a caveat here, which is, of course: I have amazing friends. I have incredible, amazing, intelligent, generous, superb people in my life, friends who make me laugh and lift me up, friends who I love and who love me. But this isn't really about friendship, per se. It's about...programming? Spaces? Planning? Energy? It's about how I accidentally fall into leadership roles, but so do a lot of people? Especially the people I love. 

I have no idea how to navigate this. Stepping back doesn't feel right—it feels like a "I don't even want to go to your party" vibe. Stepping more in also doesn't feel correct, because I'm just one person and I'm already busy. Maybe I need to get more adventurous in finding those pre-existing containers? Or, weirdly, choosier? 

Whatever the answer is, there is a part of me that also recognizes that nostalgia isn't the answer. My co-op days contained real challenges—friendships that cracked, roommates so mired in their won shit they were impossible to live with, and my own uncertainty at my place in the ecosystem. And yet, part of that nostalgia, and what I suspect people generally miss about their teens and 20s, are those containers for communities to grow. We are sorely lacking in petri dishes of the same type in our late 30s and beyond, and it's hard to build them from scratch. We need comrades as we do that work. Or, at least, I do. 

Photo by Zach Louw