For the majority of my childhood, I had a built-in community in the form of my family. My great-grandmother had 12 children with a set of twins. My grandmother also had 12 children, with another set of twins. My mother is number six of 12 children. I am three of four children, and 15 of 31 first cousins.
In my house, I was the baby. My brothers are five and six years older than me. I was also the only girl for 12 years until we adopted my sister.
We didn't need a special occasion to gather. When I was little, my family, along with my uncle's family, moved into the family’s four-bedroom house together. It was one of the best times of my life. When we moved out, another one of my aunts moved in with her family. I saw my cousins during the week and spent entire summers with them. We celebrated everything together. We all gathered at my grandparents' house for Halloween, Christmas, and the New Year. We danced, ate, talked, painted faces, watched the ball drop, and hugged and kissed everyone before going home.
When my mother’s parents passed away, there seemed to be no obligation to meet up the way we once did. Everyone had their own busy lives, their own grief.
Not only did the dynamics of my family change, but I changed.
I had to learn to recreate my community many times over. My first community was my middle school and high school friends. I quickly realized that I was the outsider. It began when I noticed that I didn’t care for the typical sleepover. I never fancied the likes of gushing over boy bands. I thought it was because I was into rap music more. I did love the way Method Man and Nas looked. They still fine, I thought.
By high school, not much had changed. I found girls who were feminine like me, but not girly. You know, the type of girls who dressed like Aalyiah; baggy jeans and Timberland boots. The girly girls usually dressed like the characters Cher and Dionne from Clueless. The feminine girls still liked boys, and talking about boys was still out of my comfort zone. I mean, sure I was a cheerleader. I dated the cute popular boy and went to prom, and was voted MVP cheerleader my senior year, but none of it felt like my true identity.
I loved my friends. It wasn't as if they pressured me into doing what they liked, but in their presence, I felt like a late bloomer who should've been more interested in dating and going to prom and having sex. I slipped in and out of that group of friends until they were a nostalgic memory. I never experienced those friends in the same way again.
By my sophomore year of college, I grew closer to my theatre colleagues. They became family. We ran lines after rehearsal, and we laughed, joked, and even cried together. By junior year, I had alienated myself. My friends gushed over the news of some boy liking me. That happened more often than not. What they didn't know is that I was secretly seeing a girl at the time.
I went on dates with men and ended the night early to see a girl. I don't like to lie to anyone, especially my friends, so it became easier to dodge phone calls and group outings. I allowed myself to believe that if my friends truly knew who I was, they wouldn't accept me. I also couldn't expect them to accept what I had not accepted myself. I pushed my friends away because my desire for men was purely lust. I was beginning to realize that I had a new desire. Women.
I worried that my friends would think that I saw them sexually. I thought about how much “girl talk” I would be excluded from if I came out, so instead, I pushed most of them as far away as I could. To this day, I never came out to many of them. I just let them see photos of me with partners on social media. I was in my twenties. I didn’t know how to maturely handle what I couldn’t even bring myself to say until I was damn near 30.
Mostly, I said: “I occasionally like women,” or “I am dating a woman,” or “I'm attracted to men, but I like her more." I said all of those things instead of saying, "I'm gay."
I wondered if it were possible to lose your community for that one thing that might not be a common interest, even if we had many other things in common. I was always too afraid to find out, so I excused myself from groups.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary app defines a community as a group of people with common characteristics and interests living together within a larger society. During COVID, I learned that community is so much more than a common interest.
My wife and I were quarantined together in a one-bedroom apartment. I'm an introvert, but my wife is a bubbly "people person." She missed her friends from the gym. She missed the support. She and her friends all had a common interest; they enjoyed working out and getting fit. But they created a bond out of that gym community. During quarantine, they all encouraged one another, met up on Zoom for check-ins and they held each other accountable. When someone fell ill or lost a parent, I watched them all come together. Some of them don't even know each other's last names, yet they all showed empathy, compassion, and even praise for a job well done during virtual workouts. It didn’t matter who was gay and who was straight. It all made me realize that a community is more than just a place where we all gather because of common interests. The core of community is love.
The way I watched them love on one another, whether they knew each other well or not, reminded me of my built-in community as a child. We gathered with no special occasion out of love. I miss that, but I don’t wallow. The evolution of my life has allowed me to embrace a new normal, a new community. My new community consists of my mom, my wife, some old friends I've reunited with, and some new friends that I've met along this journey. Over time, I learned to accept and own my truth. I lead with who I am as a person and who I love. Instead of alienating myself, I let those who can't accept me weed themselves out of my life.
I hope the time we had during quarantine to talk to old friends, to catch up with new ones, remains the time we carve out of our “back-to-normal-busy-days.” I hope we remember what it felt like to have those close bonds that grew out of common interest.
I hope we are reminded that we are all connected as long as we allow love to bring us back to our community.
Dorothy Lennon is a North Carolina native residing in Atlanta, GA. She teaches Introduction to Theatre at Georgia State Perimeter College. You can find more of her writing on Medium @DorothyLennon.
