Think Community

I had a difficult time as a teenager and even into my twenties: emotionally immature, mixed up priorities, lack of empathy, short sighted, no understanding of the big picture, no sense of connection or community.

I was looking for something but didn’t know what it was or where to look. And if I’m honest with myself now, even if I had found it I wouldn’t have recognised it.

Thirty years later and things make sense. I’m living in my own golden age: a time of connection, community, control, recognition, personal and professional satisfaction, achievement, sense of pride and progress.

But I wonder if any of it would have happened, and I’d feel the same sense of fulfilment, had I not taken several specific steps along the way.

At the age of 15, I thought about community: largely that I didn’t have one but wanted one. I couldn’t articulate it well but I pursued ideas, groups, people and projects which I thought at the time would lead me to friendship and belonging. I failed a few times.

At the age of 20, I thought about community: and went to live in a small commune overseas, part of an in-built yearning to find my tribe. I packed my guitar and blank exercise books to write about my experience. I learned a lot, felt scared, failed a lot, and ultimately ran away. It wasn’t for me, but I learned a lot. Or learned a little.

For when I was in my mid-20s, I thought about community and that I didn’t have one. I felt a strong pull towards further isolation and disconnection. I felt unloved, like nothing mattered, like no one cared, and I was invincible because my actions had no consequences (or no consequences I considered meant a lot). But I was wrong. I hit a low point. And thought about community.

People popped their heads up - my family and a few new friends, who showed care and showed me that my actions do have consequences, a ripple effect, impacting those I know and love and even those around me in my broader orbit, who I don’t know.

At the age of 30, I thought about my community and started to build one around me: a creative community and an outlet for telling and sharing stories about the way I saw the world and how things could change for the better. I started to imagine a community, a world to improve connection between people, between others and myself. I started to visualise a positive future. The more I thought about it, the more I could see it, the more I craved it, the more I pursued it. It manifested by me writing about it. I wrote - plays, stories, skits, songs, television and films. It was an outlet to explore ideas, make meaningful connections and build a more positive life. I felt a significant shift towards a positive future and the feeling of spiralling out of control, towards deep isolation and discontentment started to fade.

At the age of 40, I thought about community: and moved from a full time writing phase into a community building phase, using my work and professional environments to build communities around me: poetry, music, storytelling, community partnerships, creative projects such as creating opportunities for poets to write poems on pillows for major hotels, producing a community festival in shops on Acland Street, St Kilda, creating a phone app to promote Australian poets and poetry, running national arts festivals, creating a peer-led youth group which built cubbies with men’s sheds, facilitated kids undertaking their own personal ‘Happiness Projects’, and 10 year olds speaking at major professional community building conferences. And then there was that time I commissioned Tex Perkins to write an Ode for Tasmania. I thought this was success. But, in hindsight, although I was building pockets of communities, I was personally at arms-length from all of them. I wasn’t directly involved in or strongly personally connected with any of them. And when I went to sleep at night, they were gone. They only existed between 9-5pm when I was on the computer or phone making them happen. And they didn’t exist for me. Only others.

Sometimes I wasn’t even present. It was my job, not my tribe.

At the age of 50, I think about community quite differently. I guess coinciding with having two beautiful children, seeking friends and community for them, whilst also seeking and finding some sense of financial and geographical stability for myself and family, things have started to gel.

All the learnings and passion and yearning I’ve had all these years, to find and be able to contribute to community, likeminded people who want the same things: nice place to live, fun things to do, a passion to pursue, feelings of belonging and connection, friendships, fun, laughter, joy, happiness.

This is a golden age for me. I’m sure on my death bed I’ll look back at this time in my life and believe it was a wonderful era of my existence. I have arrived at a time and in a place where I love my community and feel sure about how to contribute to it in a positive way, to embed myself in a place and environment where I can add value to it, not to my own detriment or because it’s my job or to avoid other aspects of my life or to prove anything, but because I want to, because I can, because I know how important it is to feel welcomed, to feel like I have a place where I feel I belong and I am desperate to help others feel that too.

People say I’m so busy, with all the projects and things I do in the community, and I am. But isn’t that everything? To live in a place where we can give as much as we take? Where we can contribute towards making a place better for people, step by step, one small action at a time? They add up. One action is good. The aggregate of many actions can make a huge impact.

Life is short. We don’t have long on this earth. I am desperate to contribute to and help build the kind of community I’ve always thought about and desired, for myself and my family, a community that is here with me along for the ride, a community that acknowledges people including myself, helps me to feel visible and welcome, and where I can help others to feel safe, welcome, visible, heard, connected and recognised. In the ways they want to be heard and seen.

When I was young, I thought about community. I still think about it. Every day.