How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community

Self-care wasn’t enough; we wanted community care.

Perhaps most damaging, it includes a toxic individualism that creates barriers to deep connection and intimacy. When we are oriented toward doing it ourselves and getting ours, we cut ourselves off from the kinds of relationships that can…

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Any deviation from the model is seen as second best or underachieving. Adoption is something you do after pregnancy doesn’t work out. Being a single parent only happens when you can’t keep or find a partner. Divorce is a failure. A rental is where you live until you’ve gotten your down payment together. Unmarried couples are asked, “When are you ge

As I wrote, I had the familiar feeling of struggling to reach past the edges of my understanding toward something more aligned with the truth I wanted to grasp and articulate.

Capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy (all of which create offshoots like ableism, transphobia, ageism, and others) are embedded in the systems and institutions we all interact with—everything from housing to health care to media to jobs to education.1 But they are also embedded in each of us.

And it made me a little heartbroken to be newly aware of what’s possible but absent from the world I regularly live in.

“Just think about the way we talk about relationships now,” she said to me. “Significant others—significant means ‘sex partner.’ What a weirdly narrow notion of significant.”

Part of what systemic oppression does is limit the choices and agency of the people who experience it. But it also works to convince us that we have no agency and no choice. As Alice Walker said, “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”

i want a world where when people ask if we are seeing anyone we can list the names of all our best friends and no one will bat an eyelid. i want monuments and holidays and certificates and ceremonies to commemorate friendship.1 —ALOK VAID-MENON