Organizing in Community, Also When You Have No Experience

As I've gotten my feet underneath me with regard to this blog / newsletter – what to write about, how often to write about it – there's a certain existential dread I've been avoiding. As I write this, the U.S. government has tied its own record for the longest shutdown period (35 days) in history.

This shutdown, of course, impacted so much more than standard federal services, like websites and civil servants' paychecks. This time, people on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) faced being unable to eat for the first time in decades.

It's been making me wonder: what if a major disaster occurred during shutdown?

After all, Hurricane Melissa, an unfathomable Cat 5 at this time of year, recently devastated Jamaica. Even last year at this time, my community was just starting to clean up from Hurricane Helene.

What will it really mean for states and localities to address future disasters without federal assistance?

"Community" is not a simple answer

Watching a recent Red, Wine and Blue video podcast, two quotes stood out to me. First, Ruth Ben Ghiat said at 25:00:

"... as things fall apart in this country and get worse, community is going to be everything. And what do I mean by this? It's both that the state can become a hostile force.... But the state can also be absent. Like think about, hey, the state's not going to help you with disaster relief anymore... the state is not acting the way it used to act when we were a democracy. And community is going to become so important.... It's going to be like the the way that we revive as a society."

That's the whole point of this blog / newsletter, and I was happy to have tapped into the broader progressive zeitgeist. But I couldn't help going back to something Ben Ghiat had also said just two minutes previously:

"So women have often been the kind of glue of those horizontal ties, the community bonds could be bonds in civil society institutions, whether they're faith communities or mothers' groups or whatever. And so women know how to do that. They've always done that."

I couldn't help wondering: which women?

Growing up, most of what I experienced with other girls and women was hardly a cozy kaffeeklatsch or sewing circle or book club. We moved around a lot because of my father's job, so every three years or so I'd start over in a new school, never knowing all the vagaries of "Girl Code" because my mother's relationships with her mother and mother-in-law, church social circles, and her own daughter were so fraught.

By high school I'd decided I didn't trust or particularly like other girls or women. I felt drawn to traditionally male-dominated environments, like the Air Force and law enforcement, only to find that I mirrored things about other women – insecurity, fawnishness – that they didn't like about themselves.

Needless to say, I didn't learn how to glue horizontal ties, form informal community bonds, or even make friends. For me, each social gathering had an eager beginning, a stressful middle, and a relieved, often mortified end. Surviving each interaction without appearing weird was my primary goal, and the idea of any communication strategy never even entered my head.

It was a pattern that would follow me into and straight through adulthood. Of course, undiagnosed neurodivergence meant what I was really doing was masking. But I didn't have a name for that. I didn't realize that when the adults in my life told me I was too sensitive (and insensitive), too loud, too stubborn, they were only projecting their own issues on me.

I just believed they were right. I believed no one could possibly want me around.

It was hardly the recipe for strong community-building.

How trauma undermines our ability to organize

We're at a moment in history where organizing has never been more important, and yet, remains far beyond the scope of my comfort level. And just as you don't want to form a community among desperate people in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, I feel awkward joining existing groups that have been organizing for far longer than I've been around.

The times I've tried, I've ended up triggered. I couldn't tell whether I was projecting old patterns of relating onto others, or whether they were the same kinds of personalities recreating those patterns. It became safer and easier to isolate myself, convinced I was too damaged for anyone else to care about me.

Even after I separated from my husband in 2021, at times when I desperately needed community, I found myself struggling to trust others. Service providers would take advantage of my lack of knowledge about basic home improvement. Neighbors would want something in return for helping me, and withdraw when I didn't have the energy to deliver. I could only imagine that now they thought of me as a taker.

No, it's not a great way to go through life. And yet, I struggled to overcome my fears.

I worked on healing. I started to heal my scapegoat trauma, which kept me taking on other people's projections. I learned more about myself and who I was. I showed up when I could and forgave myself when I couldn't.

I'm still not a meaningful part of any community.

This is really what's behind my drive to attend local emergency management training, as out of place as I continue to feel. I'm trying to build my network through learning – to belong, if even temporarily – and to heal my interpersonal relationship "stuff."

I'm not sure what's likely to happen when another disaster happens and the federal apparatus isn't there to organize food delivery or volunteer assistance to places where food availability may be limited and volunteers are digging their own way out of disaster.

My intent is to offer what I can, when I can, in the way that I can. I may not offer what other people expect from a woman (though I do enjoy cooking, just saying). But I tend to think that's not only okay; it's also crucially necessary to challenge others' expectations.

Join me and subscribe to figure it out together?