Do you ever think back to a specific time in your life and think, ‘Good lord, I was an idiot’? If you answered no…yes you do.
I’ve been thinking recently about a time a couple years ago when I was, in fact, a huge idiot. It was my junior year of college, and I managed to almost singlehandedly turn a community space in my beloved English department into a toxic environment that made anyone who wandered in feel tense and uncomfortable. I was battling pretty severe anger, and often losing, and that coupled with the impregnable sense of victimhood that my supervisor (and roommate) brought to the department spelled disaster. I became a bully, in the worst, most passive aggressive ways, waging petty war on someone who didn’t deserve my anger and didn’t know how to handle it.
It eventually got so bad that one of my professors had to step in and tell me to grow up or leave. It was a huge wake-up call for me, because that department (a single hallway in a small private school) was more like a home than my apartment for me, and I didn’t want to leave. This professor was also a kind, generous, and forgiving person, so his censure weighed heavily on my conscience.
I chose to face my anger with more maturity, and I began going to therapy (a wonderful experience for another post). As penance, I was assigned the ambiguous and challenging task of “fostering community”–a seemingly Herculean task at the time, but one which I flourished in.
And you know what? I did it. I built that community.
I don’t say this to brag, or to blow my own horn, or to impress you with my transformation, because it wasn’t really a transformation at all. It was a decision I made to put my anger in perspective, re-prioritize my life, and move forward. It’s one of the things I’m most proud of, not because I did anything particularly extraordinary in the larger scale, but because it represented a time when I could have chosen to burrow into my anger and my fear and my self-doubt, and instead I chose to learn from it, accept it, and move forward. I still struggle with anger, but I’m becoming better and better at learning from my mistakes.
However, the tenuousness of community is an interesting thing. I threw myself into nurturing and growing a community that I myself had fractured, and (somewhat miraculously) it grew. But recently I’ve learned that this community has begun to struggle with negativity and in-fighting. This small, supportive space that I’ve been so proud of–this tiny alcove of literary love–seems to be cycling back into toxicity. Learning this has introduced a whole new challenge for me: letting it be.
My instinct is to jump on it and want to fix everything that’s wrong with it, but that is no longer my place, and (it must be said, despite the fact that I’m attending the annual Halloween party tomorrow) the English department is no longer a place I belong. Immediately following this is the desire to talk to my friends who are still in the department and offer my advice, solicited or otherwise, and I have. However, this experience is slowly teaching me a couple of things:
- A community, for all its ideals and ideas, is still simply a group of people. And people don’t always get along. And that’s okay. Even people who share a love and passion for something as beautiful and universal as the written word will sometimes fall into the pull of negativity–which is fine, until it isn’t.
- Negativity, lack of communication, and ego can kill a community. Well, maybe not kill it, but hurt it. And I don’t mean ever being negative, ever failing to communicate, etc. I mean when negativity becomes an indulgence, when lack of communication becomes passive aggressiveness, and when ego becomes pride that has nothing to do with creating something helpful.
- Distance can be affirming. Both for yourself and the community at large, taking a break from an environment can be something that benefits everyone. This is certainly something that I have taken a long time to learn.
- It’s okay to leave things in the past. Whether it be the negativity that overruns a community or the responsibility for the community itself (as I’m learning now), recognizing that there’s a time and place for everything is a challenging, but healthy step on the road to becoming.
Maybe things won’t get better in that community, and maybe things already are. All I can do now is hope for the best and offer what little advice and experience I have (but from now on, only when I’m asked).
