i begin writing this battling a nasty cold, so i will be direct right here (and that may help in finally getting all these thoughts in order that i've been wanting to put down). i've been saying that the most important thing that's come out of this year for me is becoming entrenched in community. 2024 was the first year in which i've been adjusting to full-time work and being out of uni and really trying to be an Adult. it was a time of adjustment and settling. but as i've espoused a ton, i fear complacency, and at the start of the year i inadvertently entered a local in-person monthly tournament for this video game i've been getting into, and that may be the single best thing i've done for myself all year.
sometimes when i speak about community, a lot of people think of friends. and i do not want to disparage the connection of friendship; it is a vital one to possess, and i definitely cherish my own friends so so much. but instead i just want to look towards a particular form of community most should be familiar with: school. in school, you do have your friends of course, but there are so many other kinds of relationships you can have that is also very crucial for the development of you as a human: you can seek mentorship from teachers or older students who provide guidance and direction, you can interact often with peers and acquaintances you see daily even if it's just in passing through the common interests that comes with the shared setting of school, you can have some little bit of rivalries who push you and you push them to perform, heck, i think even the relationship you have towards the person you find kinda annoying but they happen to be in all your classes and they're otherwise harmless is important too in developing that sense of navigating imperfect social situations and becoming more tolerant of people's differing quirks and social oddities. there is much more to community than friendship; all of these variations on relationships you can have in a community are just so meaningful for your growth as a person, these different aspects of human socialisation which especially can overlap as relationships are not just bucketed to one kind but intertwine in different ways, bolstering and providing even more social nuances to those relationships even further. i don't want to make a sweeping statement of "school is good for everyone and their development" because i do know it has failed at that for many (there's probably something to be said about being forced into a community versus entering one yourself that is also more deliberately constructed by community leaders that i don't feel like delving into). what i'm trying to get across is that if you only have friends and feel that is your community (or, as i'll rebut even more momentarily, that you don't need a community because you just need your friends), then… i won't go the full distance of saying you're wrong but just that i'd be suspect that your friend group is enough to provide the social breadth to make you a fuller human being.
community to me necessitates the maintenance and cultivation of various social relationships with all sorts of people who share baseline interests. there's a disparaging tone given to the idea of relationships by proximity, like those of friendships with people from school who you drift away from once you've graduated, but i find no fault in that. communities are always in flux, they get built up, they fall apart, people enter them, leave them, relationships within them change. it is a feature of this.
but i digress: i honestly do not think i am the person to talk about all the inner-workings of community and the process of building it since to be frank, i'm just a fortunate person who was able to find one to step into! i still consider myself somewhat green to how one goes about forming a burgeoning community when presented a lack of an accessible one, let alone the more nitty-gritty details of actually doing the work to build up the the infrastructure for maintaining it. but what i do want to talk about is something more base, something i feel is lacking from many people online: the want for community. in such an atomised society, there's so many who've been steeped in this atomisation that they believe they don't need community like this. or they can't find community like this. or maybe they can't even bring themselves to have it cross their mind, just sitting with some vague loneliness. and i'm sorry to tell you this: you need people. you need community. i think you should want to seek out community and not be socially complacent.
keeping those who feel they do not need community in mind, there's a particular kind of social relationship that i want to focus on, though it's an odd one to examine considering my touting of community. strangers. people you don't know, who you're interfacing with the first time ever. now this isn't a sort of relationship you can traditionally foster as by definition, further developing a relationship with a stranger just makes them not a stranger anymore. but also isn't this the crux of everything? in some ways, strangers are crucial to community, because every person you interact with was once a stranger to you. and even if you've come to develop a connection with them eventually, you still had to interact with them as a stranger first. strangers can't form the entire basis of one's social circles and community, of course, but to begin to build community, i believe you should be able to love a stranger: the person you overhear at a concert cracking a bit just to themselves, the child in the backseat of a car waving to you, the passenger on the train helping a foreign tourist stow away their bags. do you think it's possible for you to love these people? and i do not speak of loving undiscerningly; what i am asking you is if you can allow yourself the capacity to love anyone*
sonder is defined as follows:
there is a quiet mantra i have been repeating to myself over the last year: to love sondrously. when you brush up against strangers in life, carving out the tiniest of slivers and putting a bit of yourself in it and then realising the entire world that you have inserted yourself into, the day-to-days and the ambitions and the worries and the loved ones and the everything that you can not begin to fathom, then how can you not impart some bit of love to some bit of those others?
this is a review for the visual novel Z.A.T.O. // I Love the World and Everything In It. and this is where i admit something that may undermine everything i've been spewing forth: i am not certain if this is a right way to love. i can offer some aspects to this love that makes this seem unappealing to even me:
but to be selfish here, i just want to talk about motivation.
in Z.A.T.O, the protagonist, asya, a girl in middle school, contends with a universe that she feels, averaging in magnitudes absolute, determines a sort of normality in her life: every day she goes to school, every day she is teased by the same group of boys (she finds this more mundane than troubling), every day she sees a bird fly past her window, every day after school she takes a walk around her small russian town in a near-perpetual winter. there are days which are not quite "every day," when she meets a girl who stands up to her bullies and becomes somewhat interested in her acquaintance, only to disappear, when she meets another girl, concerned with the former's disappearance, when she starts to spend some quality time with the leader of the group who bully her, when she has flashbacks to deeply rooted traumas, yet as asya understands it, all this novelty does not affect the average the universe self-corrects towards. still, beholden to this world of disparities amongst the ordinary, asya can not help but love it in its entirety, and the visual novel is rife with her existential contemplations on the operations of such a world.
while the disruptions in asya's normal do dissipate in the face of the totality that is the universe's trajectory, notably these disruptions involve her interacting with people for the first time in a new light and, while learning more about these people, illuminate aspects of these lives that are oft left in the dark. what does persist from seeing these parts of people's lives is something more within: her attitude with herself. when borne witness to these worlds within the big one you love, how can the world internal not come to mind? what if you are the world? what if all that you could ever observe was within you? would you allow yourself that same curiosity? can you love yourself like you love a stranger?
my answer is my motivation: i don't know if i can. it feels easier for me to attempt to convince others to love sondrously because if there are others out there who love like me, then it may be true that there are others who may love me sondrously. and i know that this is cowardly. i have found so much love for community, for people this year, what say me to offer this to myself as well? and instead i go on this roundabout way: if someone can love me as a stranger, then maybe i'm able to love myself like a stranger.
i think this year, i want to try to allow myself the capacity to be loved. and despite my hesitance, i think i know where this must start.