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

A free person was someone who was “joined to a tribe of free people by ties of kinship and rights of belonging.”11 Freedom was the idea that together we can ensure that we all have the things we need—love, food, shelter, safety. The way I’ve come to understand it, freedom is both an individual and collective endeavor—a multilayered process, not a s

Self-awareness is the bridge to healing our damage and trauma, and rewriting the stories that formed as a result.

One person does not build family or a community. While I can claim my deliberate effort, everyone who is part of my circles participated in their creation—actively or passively, they built with me.

This is a process of decolonization. Whether you are the descendants of colonizers or the colonized—or, like me, both—all of our peoples have experienced the loss of something essential to our liberated well-being. Whether that was taken from you or given away in the bargain to win power, it is loss.

While the American Dream has never been an option for most members of some communities—queer folks, unmarried adults, Black folks, people who grow up poor, just to name a few—it’s also overpromised on the satisfaction, contentment, and happiness it delivers to people who do get their piece of it. The people winning at the American Dream are some di

It might be that our desires change or that our circumstances just don’t line up with an old vision. Either way, many people told me that discarding the picture they had of how their lives would be—sometimes joyfully, sometimes through grieving—was necessary in order to fully embrace something better, or at least accept something different.

“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.”

“Culture is powerful precisely because it is so present and at the same time so very difficult to name

We are the only ones who can decide we will heal and grow, but it’s a collective process.