On the search for home and community
I feel as if I’ve straddled two worlds my entire existence, and as I age, the gap between them seems to be widening rather than shrinking.
It feels a little self-indulgent to write so focused on myself, but it has been surprisingly healing to look back and notice something I believed I had been searching for for a short time, I had been searching my entire life. I hope you may find this helpful in your own journeys—plus, I do just love to read these kinds of more personal stories from others.
Growing up, we never owned our house. My family rented, which meant we moved every 5 years or so. Granted, we never moved that far, but the unease of knowing that our home wouldn’t be our home in a couple of years always stayed with me, so much so that buying my own place was always at the top of the priority list–at the back of my mind for every life decision I made.
Budding from ‘smart’ career choices, unfortunate family deaths, and sheer determination–and pressure from me unto my boyfriend–we bought our first home at 19—a brown, ex-council, pebble dash terrace house. A lot of our friends, family, and colleagues thought we were a little crazy, but at long last I had this coveted stability and security I was looking for–and I could finally hang stuff on the walls. (This was all slightly dampened when we realised the house hadn’t had the electrics done since the 70s–we couldn’t afford a structural survey–and the fact that the house stank of the old owner’s poor Alsatian which they kept locked under the stairs).
One of the things I was looking forward to at my new house was a sense of community. My siblings and I were home-educated growing up, spending a large chunk of my under 10s living in the traditional English countryside, taking inspiration from our surroundings. We were a part of various home-ed groups, gathering with misfits who had similar-enough beliefs, looking for a sense of companionship and community, who wanted to create a better life for their children than they had.
People, especially those with a distaste for the machine, are often in awe when I tell them of this time–and I do feel it has given me a unique perspective to see life though–but at the time I was most envious of my friends who went to a real school (or more likely the kids I saw on TV who went to ‘real’ school) the walk to school, the conversations at the school gates, the sports days, plays, and field trips sounded more fun than the things we did.
But, as life is wont to do, things didn’t stay quite so idyllic and the lifestyle started to crumble. Groups fell apart, money troubles got in the way. Community is hard to build and even harder to maintain, and people often aren’t sure how to take part in it anymore–something which I don’t blame them for. How are we supposed to know how to create a community when most of us have never experienced it?
In the various rented homes of my childhood, we rarely spoke to our neighbours. But as we bought a house on the same estate my boyfriend grew up in, and I had gotten used to watching his mother know almost every household by name, I thought we might have something similar ourselves. We got to know our neighbours pretty well–well enough to borrow sugar, swap power tools, and keep biscuits on hand for one family’s 11 cats–and it did fulfil some small sense of community inside of me, but it was never enough.
Though Birmingham definitely feels like my home now, I have never truly felt like I had any place of belonging, of ancestral land. My friend recently mapped her family tree back to the 1200s, uncovering pictures of great-great grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins. I tried to do this too and barely got past my grandparent's generation. I don’t know where I’m from, who I’m from, to where I belong.
My family isn’t from one place. My mom grew up in Birmingham and my dad grew up in Hull–though his mother grew up in Cornwall. I grew up in various places across the West Midlands–and my siblings are now dotted across the country in their own chosen cities. Not feeling much connection to where I grew up, I moved to Birmingham with my half-Irish, half-Brummie boyfriend, though we haven’t decided where we’ll settle with our future children.
Fast forward a few years, my boyfriend and I are–thankfully–still together and we decided to sell our home. The new owners of our terrace house were quick to buy–they didn’t get a survey either, so they’re stuck with the shoddy electrics now–and due to something to do with the housing market, we now have a new build apartment and money leftover in our pockets. (I guess I’m winning the game of capitalism?)
I am in love with my apartment from a young professional, easy modern living perspective. It’s easy to keep clean, I am near shops and restaurants, I am a quick train journey into the city centre, and an even quicker walk away from nature. But there is very little sense of community here. There are 60 apartments in this building, but I only know the names of 3 of my neighbours–mostly from Amazon packages being delivered to us by accident. I don’t think I could recognise our neighbours on the street, and I don’t feel like I could knock on their door in times of crisis.
I feel as if I’ve straddled two worlds my entire existence, and as I age, the gap between them seems to be widening rather than shrinking. I love my life, and yet I often feel lost in this place.
Like many climate-doom-aware, modernity-and-the-machine-distrusting individuals, I’ve always dreamt of owning my own piece of land with a cosy little cabin, of picking up my life, running away from society, into the woods, and living in peace. A place where I can know the names of the flora and fauna, where I can grow my own food, and raise my own family with dirt from our land under our fingernails.
I would still like to live this dream, though I am wary that running away is not a solution, it doesn’t sit right with me to be part of the lucky ones who get to abandon society, whilst the rest of the world is still on fire.
In this fantasy, I also try to remind myself of the writing of Paul Kingsnorth and his search for belonging: “[W]hy should this poor little plot of land have to bear the weight of meaning that some wandering primate has wanted to layer upon it? Why should anyone or anything have to bear the weight of our stories?”
The most immediate answer to this search for belonging, for community, is to find something where we currently are. Rather than spending the next 10 years dreaming of this cabin in the woods, only to move there and realise it hasn’t solved all our problems, we might spend this time building these relationships where we already are.
I am still trying to figure out how I, as a childless, (traditional) jobless, apartment-dwelling woman, can find community in this world. Though my first thought is that I find myself in a uniquely troubling position, I realise many others must feel the same. So many of us are feeling lost, and yet we’re often blaming each other for it.
We live in an independent culture, where we are taught to believe that we don’t need others to survive and that if we have enough money, we can buy any life we want. But when the supply chains stop and the lights go out, we’re going to wish we had people around us to help.
Rather than running into the woods to live even more individualistic lifestyles, instead, I want to find people around me, in my apartment block, in my town, in my city, who are building–or want to build–the resilient communities we need to weather the oncoming storm.
I’ve written a lot about this community resilience a lot, but I am still struggling to find it in my own life. It feels like a two-step-forward and one-step-back kind of thing–I try something scary and new but it’s not quite right; I sign up for events, but life's responsibilities get in the way. I shoot off lots of emails, but they seem to get lost in people’s inboxes.
I know I need to step further outside of my comfort zone, try new things and fail along the way as we create this new path. Perhaps this is the challenge we all must face, to knock on a neighbour's door, to reach out to an organisation, to get our hands dirty as we charter this unknown territory.
P.S. If you enjoy my writing, you can buy me a coffee to fuel my work.
You might also like to read:
Is climate burnout a thing?
I found myself Googling ‘climate burnout’ recently–which felt like the most 21st-century, middle-class, Gen Z thing I’ve ever done–and it turns out: it’s a real thing! (an exclamation mark of both excitement to be recognised, but exasperation that the term exists).
I loved this piece, I like your writing style! And this sentence struck a chord with me:
"How are we supposed to know how to create a community when most of us have never experienced it?" - profoundly true and now I also understand why it's so hard to build a community.
“We live in an independent culture, where we are taught to believe that we don’t need others to survive and that if we have enough money, we can buy any life we want. But when the supply chains stop and the lights go out, we’re going to wish we had people around us to help.” yes yes yes!!
related to this so much. i feel like im in an in-between stage where i know community-building is good for me and also important for the world but also feeing trapped by anxiety/daily stresses ... but maybe, like u said, i just need to push myself more!
im trying to think of it like exercise -- maybe dreading the beforehand but it feels soo good afterward and is even more important in the long run!