Creating Community

With four years of experience as a freshman dormitory resident assistant and a budding career as a city planner, it shouldn't come as a huge surprise that I have a passion for creating community. These things are largely about encouraging and fostering a sense of community among others.

This past year, however, has been my first experience with having to focus on creating a community for myself. It has tested me, exposed my insecurities, and stretched me. Several months ago I realized that this was the first time some sort of community was not built into my everyday life. Until last fall, I had been in school, which always created an automatic community for me to some degree. Another community I had was the Indian families in Ames who my family was close with.

I grew up in a college town. When I moved here, it was the first time academia was not a part of my daily life in some way. This is why I feel so at home in Charles Village near Hopkins’ Homewood Campus, and why a lot of my friends that I have made in Baltimore are graduate students. Being around nerdiness is a norm for me.

In the last several months I have been accused of being not just outgoing and social, but very social. This is so strange to me. I think sometimes I still perceive myself as the timid, insecure grade school kid I once was, the girl who always had this inner confidence but who felt like a big dork socially. But when I had a party in June and had sixty-five people on my evite, and had almost thirty people crammed in to my one-bedroom apartment, I realized that there was something to all those accusations. How did I go from knowing virtually no one in Baltimore to sixty-five people I felt comfortable enough with to invite to my party? Since then the number of people I know has certainly multiplied, which is even more mind-boggling.

Creating community is not about sheer numbers, but numbers do help. You start feeling like you’re a part of a place when you can randomly run into people wherever you go. But if I had to choose between having a hundred people I could call friends versus one or two people who are really close friends that I can count on regularly and who count on me, it would be the latter. These would be people who don’t mind driving me to Dulles airport if I can’t get a flight out of BWI, people who will ask me to go to the doctor with them because they’re nervous and want moral support, people who call me just to chat, people who actually care about the inane details of my day-to-day life, people who don’t mind requesting me to bring extra food to their parties when they have them. It’s great to know dozens of people, because apparently, I am super social. I thrive around people-energy. But what floors me is that I have made a half dozen or so close friends who really care about me and expect things from me and who I can count on.

Creating community in the absence of a pre-constructed “box” to put the community in has been a challenging and rewarding experience. The people in my Baltimore/DC life are a diverse group of people, and though I think I may always seek my comfort zones such as university communities, I have enjoyed constructing a box for myself.

Anyway, this post was precipitated by my feelings of insecurity earlier today when I felt I had invited myself to someone’s party and that perhaps I wasn’t really wanted there. The people throwing the party have never done anything to make me feel this way, if anything, it’s been just the opposite. But for some reason, as social as I supposedly am, that insecure little girl inside shows up anyway. Thankfully, I had community to rely on (two close Baltimore friends, one best friend three time zones away, and one mom) to tell that little girl that her feelings were valid but to please shut up and stop being so paranoid. And then I went to the party, and surprise surprise, I had a fabulous time. The little girl will never go away but maybe she will slowly grow up. As she does, I will continue to build and strengthen this box of my creation.