Collective, Identity
A sense of belonging, to yourself.
At this point, I’ve been doing substack as a (mostly) faithful practice for the last six months. The material from those six months was a buckshot of personal thoughts, essays and short stories, but I’ve always had trouble describing what my substack is generally about if it comes up. One of the most concise phrases I’ve boiled it down to was it being on Creativity and Community. I’d agree with that description on most days, but what kind of a contrarian would I be if I didn’t try to attack my own description?
I stand by what I say about community; It’s something that’s all-important to a healthy society. What I probably haven’t been clear on, is the belief that a community can have any intention, but only be as effective as the collective efforts. A community serves the people that serves the community, but that person also needs to be able to serve themselves.
There’s a good chance that most people reading this have identified as having belonged to group at large parts throughout their life. Whether it’s a similarity baced on race or background, or hobbies, even being in a group of friends counts. Everyone wants to find a place of belonging, and want to find kindred spirits. What it doesn’t mention is the personal price people might end up paying for it, which is the decline of individuality.
Back in college, I used to be part of the Filipino cultural club in my college. I went to a university that nobody I knew went to, and was nowhere near my current level of social competence. I saw the club at a club fair and I was already qualified to join just because of the racial identity coded in me. The other thing about me at the time was that I didn’t have a very strong sense of self in relation to the world. I’d generally agree to doing most things because I always felt like my place in the group was dependent on my compliance and agreeability.
I wasn’t blackmailed or pressured into doing anything while I was there, but I did realize that I had an unhealthy relationship with myself and didn’t have the faculties to deal with that at the time, so I generally let myself get carried along and act for the group. The pressure I’ve felt if any at all, was of my own devices.
This was a recurring theme in my 20s, where I’d integrate into a group and let that define the metrics of what my social life is. A group of people that play video games a lot skewed my interests more towards playing games and being more sedentary. If there’s a bar / drinking culture I’d be a lot more liberal with libations. I’ve brought that up in previous posts, where I surrendered my agency for doing doing things in favor of what’s good for the group, which has led to me trying to remove groups I’m a part of to try to figure out what’s left.
The following years led to a pursuit of individualism, to try to nurture that personal identity of who I am but also not tying my values to it. It did mean doing a lot of things alone, and going to events alone. I was of course open to making friends and new connections, but there was also a growing part of me that kept most closer connections at an arm’s length just because I didn’t want to fall into those old habits. I was in a friend-hoe phase, where I didn’t have commitment or loyalty to any one cluster of people, but was more than open to the new and casual connections I was having compared to when I was in a somewhat closed system.
I knew it wasn’t a permanent arrangement for me, and I knew I wasn’t going to forgoe having intimate circles of trusted people in favor of being an abject loner. My process came from a realization that there isn’t much of me outside of the spaces I occupy, either willingly or by default. I had to learn how to be alone, and enjoy being alone. It sounds very generic, but it took me years to finally figure out how to be myself, regardless of company.
Last week I celebrated one year with my photography club, the Photograpals. It’s a club I started from CreativeMornings, and one of the first earnest attempts to try and foster my own community, aside from a few less than successful attempts through reddit meetups. It was a big undertaking, as a meetup that lived and died by my own organization, and for a very common idea, the community is built on a culture that I had to define.
Doing the Shadow Work of Identity is where I’m at right now, a process I’m still going through. It’s an effort that runs parallel to my efforts in community building, and is a blueprint I’m using on how I want to show up in those spaces. I hold a lot of joy and attachment in the spaces I’m in currently, but I’m also keeping mindful of keeping an individuality. There’s one question though; Is there a stopping point?
