Sep 28, 2008 23:57
Communit-Me
Dedicated to my Friends, near and far
It’s hard for me to pinpoint, a daily digestion of my own persona, trying to determine why I am who I am and find reasons behind my actions. The means to my ends creates such confusion in my own life. My mornings are sometimes puzzles where I have to put together the pieces from the day before to find out how everything unraveled in front of me or how, without chance, everything went my way.
Sometimes I’m so sure that I’m not the person I want to be and that the things people say about me, especially the good things, are merely moments where I accomplished a miraculous personality shift and became something I’m not.
Over the weekend I had the chance to be a spectator during the Queens University homecoming football game. I watched as thousands of students and alumni were cheering and chanting in unison as a single entity; the community of Queens. They had a culture all their own with a social structure, art, song, dance, and ritualistic tradition involving the beating of jackets on the ground at halftime. All of this was quite overwhelming and it brought me back to the days of chapel at M.B.C.I where worship would be going on all around me with hundreds of students singing unfamiliar songs and waving their arms in the air. In both places I was alien and confused unsure how to act in the presence of everyone who was so seemingly inbred with this into their being.
As the night ended and the crowd scattered leaving me to my work and the quiet of the night I had the chance to think about the sense of Community and belonging that I had witnessed. I was thinking about those times where I sat in Chapel and watched rather than join in and wondered how into the song and dance I would have gotten if I had been one of the fans instead of the television crew. Would I have done one of my 180’s for the night and became a singing dancing machine or just go through the motions as per usual.
Thinking about it as I write this I’m split down the middle.
Looking back at my life I’ve always tended to be drawn to people where no matter what situation we’re in I can most likely predict how they’ll act and I know I’ll go along with it because it’s what I’d be doing regardless.
This is where my life in Toronto becomes complicated because instead of going out and having my core group of people that are all acting like I do and having my actions masked by the group mentality I’m drawn out into the open and exposed which is what I’m struggling with.
For the first two years I managed to find keep myself within similar groups but for reasons unconcerned with this, those groups are shrinking and more and more I find myself feeling a bit out of place.
More than ever I feel the need for a sense of Community or at least a more tangible sense of belonging.
I can project myself to that Queens game in the stands and steal that “all for one and one for all” sensation from similar experiences in my own life and know that for those people that feeling will never leave them and it will bring them back for homecoming when it’s their time to return and be honored by the other members. That’s exactly how I feel when I come back to Winnipeg.
My patience for that feeling to surface in Toronto has been short to say the least and this entire chronicle might be just a result of that but it also serves to detail just how important that kind of thing is in my life.
Right now if I could best describe how I act in Toronto using metaphor I would say that I’m a turtle who is constantly in his shell looking out through the narrow passage ways making sure it’s safe to come out and show who I am. It sounds pretentious I know but there’s a great deal to offer inside that shell but it’s hard to feel secure when you never look outside. The saddest part is that I realize this and often fail to make that effort to poke my head out instead I convince myself to be content and isolate myself inside my own little world regardless of cost literally or figuratively. But those moments I do come out and experience the world in which I live are the best times of my time here because I can share and grow in the relationships I have formed with my friends here. And I think to myself, mystified most of the time, how lucky I am to have found such people who accept me at first and then give me chances to redeem myself for my moments of inherent introversion (and then overindulgence).
Eventually I feel I will reach a happy medium with myself and with the friends I’ve found here. I just wish I was able to express this entire idea in a much more precise thought rather than recalling my entire life and how it has brought me to this point. In the examination of the self though, the entire machine has to come apart before you can understand how it works and I must say that if the people in my life are any reflection on myself, then it works pretty damn well.
*authors note - I haven’t written anything substantial in a long time and it may not be on par with other introspective essays I’ve composed but I hope it meets expectations. Usually these are a way for me to figure things out and I will suggest to anyone if you ever need to figure out anything about yourself, write a personal essay about it, you’ll be surprised at what you find within.