Community & Isolation

The weekend before I began work, I went camping for two nights, hiking for two days, with a group of strangers. I slept in my own tent, alone, for the first time in my life. While my sleeping bag was sliding down the hillside on which I had pitched my tent and I was cursing myself for spending my last weekend of unlimited sleep time on the rock-and-branch-peppered ground, and later, when I woke up thinking that I would be eaten by a mountain lion all alone in my tent, I realized that I was actually perfectly happy to be there. I was perfectly happy, albeit physically uncomfortable, to be completely alone. I realized simultaneously that the community of other campers and hikers, almost-strangers now, made it safer to be so comfortable alone. It was only with this community surrounding me, peripheral, that I felt so secure in my place, so free to feel happy alone.

Since I have also moved into my own apartment in San Francisco, I have been alone for much of my time. After a year of living in a graduate student dorm, this is a little bit of a culture shock. I am used to friends running down the hallways to see me, to spending hours lazing around on friends' beds and floors just talking and spending time together. We were drenched in socialization, and I loved it. Of course, those who know me best also know that I spent many nights alone, not answering my phone, trying not to answer the door, just reading and writing and listening to music and pretending it was cool to not go out on a Saturday night. This unique place, filled with so many interesting and fun and funny people, is no longer my home. I miss it, but I miss more than the constant socializing--in fact, I'm not sure I miss that at all. I miss the community we built, the comfort that we spread among ourselves--the comfort to be yourself. With individuals from all over the world, studying every possible thing in graduate school, loving all sorts of different books and music and people and places, we were irreconcilably unique. And yet, we were all drawn into this same web of life, this same community. We drank at the bars together; we lounged in the grass together; we walked everywhere together; we rode night buses and biked terrifying London streets together; and we talked, we talked, we talked. Community: the place you lose your inhibitions enough to feel content to be alone. And this was it--each of us, so undeniably alone, out of place in this foreign country with customs and places we did not know, thrived because we built an intangible thing and inhabited it together. In my tent two weeks ago, I realized that I was no more alone now than I was then---my community still exists, spread all over the world, in the minds and hearts of people I have met and loved. And my community was there, around that campfire, other individuals alone in their tents. Each of us drawn to the conversation and the idea that we could someday be friends, that we could draw lines of complementarity among ourselves and find commonality, despite huge age, cultural and lifestyle differences.

I have been thinking that once we are content to be alone, community exists all around us, and we are always welcomed into it. So this is what matters: Be unafraid to be alone. Everyone you meet is part of your community.