The failed search for community and white fragility
IDA is the queer commune and place that developed my identity and defined my purpose for much of my adult life. It has become the setting of my anxiety dreams lately. I’ve had a twenty year relationship with this place, and this year is the first year in over 15 years that I will not visit at least once. Last night’s version of the aforementioned anxiety dream had me there for a work party event and needing to go home for work; I left a day too early and wasn’t sure I could circle back, I debated calling off sick so I could stay one more day. I wanted to get back to long talks in a meadow like place with cute new friends. When I got back I was chatting with a few folks who were part of the work crew fixing all these different atypical looking roofs. They bragged about the hours they put in and felt really bonded, I realized I hadn’t done much. I realized I’d missed the real party and that my commitment was lacking. I realized I had nothing to offer and should have just gone home.
My last concerted effort at engaging with IDA was through the fall work parties. I’m not going back partly because with how much the non-profit industrial complex drains me, how much geriatric psych broke my body, and the extent to which I’ve never been a super high capacity person. I don’t feel like I can keep up with the pace of that particular work party. Organizers have tried to create space for different types and levels of contributions, but I too consistently leave feeling disconnected and unhelpful.
Possibly more importantly, I’ve stopped making plans to go to IDA (at least for now) because I’ve gotten the growing sense over quite a few years that I am no longer wanted or needed as a stakeholder. I’ve been trying to wrap my brain around that gracefully, it’s not anything I have a right to feel blindsided about, I think there are some very good reasons for it, and this is me trying to process it productively. If I share this semi-publicly, it’s because it taps into some conversations some of us need to be having. It is because I want to dialogue with folks, especially white or otherwise privileged folks, or folks more or less in the second half of life, who want to get respectfully and lovingly deep into this territory.
I have been cranky and snitty about IDA at least a couple times in the past few years. I was really put out that I wasn’t asked to be on the original Work Party organizing crew. The answer I finally got as to why (“we didn’t want to burden you because you were in school”) was a thoughtful white lie that effectively helped me move forward while I more slowly came to terms with some of my own shit. I am a white person of relative financial privilege (educated lower middle class, very focused on everyone’s right to be their special snowflake and pursue satisfying occupations and pastimes). There is a degree to which my entire trajectory at IDA has been a story of my feeling the need to be able to rest on my Laurels. There are folks other that cisgender men at IDA because of me and it is super hard to think that I don’t get to grow old in that space in a way which continues to envelop me in community. I lost my capacity to hold space for a friend of mine who is a new stake holder at IDA recently; I can’t really listen to her excited brainstorms about what she wants to create there. So much of it reinvents wheels, but mostly it breaks my heart in all these stupid and deep ways which are hard not to put on other people. In the end, right now my energy for IDA is limited, and I offer no particularly relevant perspective in terms of my identity. What I have to offer IS mostly laurels, and I have failed at arriving to that space with no need for validation around my history with IDA. My needs and psychology with the place are busted; I’m not in any position to be a decent stake holder.
It would be so easy to become one of those folks who feels bitter about the opening up of POC space and the increased leadership of feminine spectrum trans folks. But those are the folks I dreamed of being there in the first place when LL and I lounged on the lawn of the first Idapalooza and started strategizing ways to bring more women and trans folks to that land. If I can dream of them being there, I can dream of them being there without me. I’m trying to muster compersion here.
My failure at magnanimity can be traced at least partially to white fragility (and some other features of privilege). It’s the same urge that makes other of my people say “but all lives matter”, or “but we have the right to be in your movement too.” There are so many things I don’t own, but the assumption of ownership has been afforded me by the culture I live in. So stepping away from that, by choice or otherwise, feels difficult. But it’s not a hardship, because others shoulder that lack of ownership as a matter of course. Taking tiny steps to default on the “birthrights” we didn’t even realize we’d accepted is painful, but it is in no way oppression.
IDA is full of hope and memories but also reminds me of an awful lot of loss and failure. I have felt very isolated lately and part of me feels like I need more community in my life, community that is unconditional and rights the deep pain of human separation in this fucked up capitalist world. I got attached to the idea of community as a static god given right, an association that came more out of rhetoric than experience. I could most clearly imagine and believe in that definition of community during my time at IDA. Also I began to learn there that community was dynamic and fleeting, and hemmed in by some of the same hierarchies and limitations as the rest of the world. Right now IDA is working to level some hierarchies and it can’t keep all corners open, and my privilege offers me many things but a corner to be validated within supportive and connected community might not always be that thing.
There is a human need to feel connected and there are things about where I meet the world and which privileges and weaknesses I have which make that thing a particularly strong anxiety for me. I have a tendency to spin that failure to find and keep that community into a narrative in which I am an awful person who did A B and C wrong and will never have anything to offer. I have to remember that it’s my own anxiety I’m dealing with, that and the human condition of isolation as constant struggle. It’s not oppression, it’s not bad politics or wrongs, it’s not something that needs to be petitioned against. I’m not guaranteed community or connection in the way my Unitarian Universalist upbringing taught me that my inherent worth and dignity having self was supposed to get it. I have not entirely figured out how to navigate making space, letting go, challenging my privilege without taking up too much space feeling shitty about it, being gracefully able to support the work around me which doesn’t include me. I have fights to figure out how to contribute to and lessons to learn and work to do and skills to perfect but I’m not guaranteed the prize that I choose.
My last concerted effort at engaging with IDA was through the fall work parties. I’m not going back partly because with how much the non-profit industrial complex drains me, how much geriatric psych broke my body, and the extent to which I’ve never been a super high capacity person. I don’t feel like I can keep up with the pace of that particular work party. Organizers have tried to create space for different types and levels of contributions, but I too consistently leave feeling disconnected and unhelpful.
Possibly more importantly, I’ve stopped making plans to go to IDA (at least for now) because I’ve gotten the growing sense over quite a few years that I am no longer wanted or needed as a stakeholder. I’ve been trying to wrap my brain around that gracefully, it’s not anything I have a right to feel blindsided about, I think there are some very good reasons for it, and this is me trying to process it productively. If I share this semi-publicly, it’s because it taps into some conversations some of us need to be having. It is because I want to dialogue with folks, especially white or otherwise privileged folks, or folks more or less in the second half of life, who want to get respectfully and lovingly deep into this territory.
I have been cranky and snitty about IDA at least a couple times in the past few years. I was really put out that I wasn’t asked to be on the original Work Party organizing crew. The answer I finally got as to why (“we didn’t want to burden you because you were in school”) was a thoughtful white lie that effectively helped me move forward while I more slowly came to terms with some of my own shit. I am a white person of relative financial privilege (educated lower middle class, very focused on everyone’s right to be their special snowflake and pursue satisfying occupations and pastimes). There is a degree to which my entire trajectory at IDA has been a story of my feeling the need to be able to rest on my Laurels. There are folks other that cisgender men at IDA because of me and it is super hard to think that I don’t get to grow old in that space in a way which continues to envelop me in community. I lost my capacity to hold space for a friend of mine who is a new stake holder at IDA recently; I can’t really listen to her excited brainstorms about what she wants to create there. So much of it reinvents wheels, but mostly it breaks my heart in all these stupid and deep ways which are hard not to put on other people. In the end, right now my energy for IDA is limited, and I offer no particularly relevant perspective in terms of my identity. What I have to offer IS mostly laurels, and I have failed at arriving to that space with no need for validation around my history with IDA. My needs and psychology with the place are busted; I’m not in any position to be a decent stake holder.
It would be so easy to become one of those folks who feels bitter about the opening up of POC space and the increased leadership of feminine spectrum trans folks. But those are the folks I dreamed of being there in the first place when LL and I lounged on the lawn of the first Idapalooza and started strategizing ways to bring more women and trans folks to that land. If I can dream of them being there, I can dream of them being there without me. I’m trying to muster compersion here.
My failure at magnanimity can be traced at least partially to white fragility (and some other features of privilege). It’s the same urge that makes other of my people say “but all lives matter”, or “but we have the right to be in your movement too.” There are so many things I don’t own, but the assumption of ownership has been afforded me by the culture I live in. So stepping away from that, by choice or otherwise, feels difficult. But it’s not a hardship, because others shoulder that lack of ownership as a matter of course. Taking tiny steps to default on the “birthrights” we didn’t even realize we’d accepted is painful, but it is in no way oppression.
IDA is full of hope and memories but also reminds me of an awful lot of loss and failure. I have felt very isolated lately and part of me feels like I need more community in my life, community that is unconditional and rights the deep pain of human separation in this fucked up capitalist world. I got attached to the idea of community as a static god given right, an association that came more out of rhetoric than experience. I could most clearly imagine and believe in that definition of community during my time at IDA. Also I began to learn there that community was dynamic and fleeting, and hemmed in by some of the same hierarchies and limitations as the rest of the world. Right now IDA is working to level some hierarchies and it can’t keep all corners open, and my privilege offers me many things but a corner to be validated within supportive and connected community might not always be that thing.
There is a human need to feel connected and there are things about where I meet the world and which privileges and weaknesses I have which make that thing a particularly strong anxiety for me. I have a tendency to spin that failure to find and keep that community into a narrative in which I am an awful person who did A B and C wrong and will never have anything to offer. I have to remember that it’s my own anxiety I’m dealing with, that and the human condition of isolation as constant struggle. It’s not oppression, it’s not bad politics or wrongs, it’s not something that needs to be petitioned against. I’m not guaranteed community or connection in the way my Unitarian Universalist upbringing taught me that my inherent worth and dignity having self was supposed to get it. I have not entirely figured out how to navigate making space, letting go, challenging my privilege without taking up too much space feeling shitty about it, being gracefully able to support the work around me which doesn’t include me. I have fights to figure out how to contribute to and lessons to learn and work to do and skills to perfect but I’m not guaranteed the prize that I choose.