Community?

As we begin the slow journey towards a re-opened world, where vaccinations have taken place and we are once again allowed to mix and mingle with people outside of our houses and bubbles, I am filled with both a sense of hope and anxiety.

Anxiety because, as the realisation struck me last week, I don’t actually have that many friends in this city.

My people are scattered across the world, in other countries and cities stuck like I have been amidst the world of COVID and grounded for the forseeable.

When I moved to Oxford almost 2 years ago I had these grand plans of building my new community, people who I could experience the city with, discover little hold-in-the-wall coffee shops, and hidden treasures of this grand place. Instead life took a different turn. One that included depression, a month signed off work, and then a pandemic, furlough, redundancy and a new job started through Microsoft teams.

I look at the past 2 years and sometimes feel like I have been frozen and wheeled along as life happened to me, little has felt in my control and often I feel like nothing in life has moved forward.

The dreams of discovering a new city disappeared as the world shut down, and I still feel like a guest here, ready to pack up and move. The dreams of a new tribe seem hard and difficult to pull together with a limit on who I could see. (I love my bubble, adore them and could not have survived without them but I miss the joy of a room full of people in community.)

And trying to build relationships through a screen has made me want to give up - the things about communication being 50% body language has been ringing in my ears.

The slow unraveling of lock-down rules has re-awakened all these hopes. The hopes I had when I decided to move back to England, the hopes I had for how I would start my 30s and for the new life I would build.

I am anxious, as I imagine so many are, that my social skills have disappeared and that my natural quietness in a room of new faces will have become exaggerated; one day in the office last month left me breathing a sign of relief when I arrived home to the cosy tiny studio I have occupied for the majority of the past 2 years.

I’ve started to ask myself (with the guidance of the ever timely HB), what it looks like for me to start building on all those hopes and dreams of community I have had to put on hold.

How do I fill my studio with people, how do I make the space into one that invites the world in, instead of where I hide away in my own world?

How do I expand my knowledge of the city I chose to live in, and invite people to discover it with me?

How do I simultaneously allow myself the time to re-adjust to the world and put myself out there to find the community I so long for… without becoming the hermit that exists only within my tiny curated space?

So I am writing lists; a list of ways to gather people around me, to build community, to give back and support. I am writing lists of the reasons why I need this, why it is something so important to me, and I am writing lists of reasons to persevere.

Why do I need these lists? Because I am someone who seems to always be ready to pack her bags, to leave when it feels hard and to hole up in my safe spaces when I don’t want to be vulnerable. I am half way out the door in my head before I allow myself to settle through the discomfort that eventually dissipates to community and laughter and friendship.

God created us for community. These past two years have made that more obvious to me than ever before. But how do we rebuild or build what has felt so lost in the past few years? How do we dig deep into the discomfort of re-adjusting and reviving the social aspects of our lives and come together in unity and vulnerability and joy?

So as we begin the slow journey towards a re-opened world, I wonder what it will look like at Christmas, and whether I will be sitting in a pub sipping mulled wine surrounded by people I barely know now.

So, if you live in Oxford, England and are reading this wanting that community too, then send me a message, I’m open for a walking coffee date.

R/

image: https://unsplash.com/photos/6VhPY27jdps?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditShareLink