A Love Letter To My Community
People avoid hard conversations or uncomfortable topics, as if separating themselves from hearing the story will somehow make what happened less real. This reaction quiets people and leaves them to deal with the pain alone, but your community does not shy away from these conversations, they sit in discomfort and pain as they empathize with you. This took me years to learn, years to accept that there are people in the world who will listen to your painful stories. I had kept my story to myself for years because I learned early on that it’s uncomfortable and people never knew what to say. So I just stopped talking about it.
A close mentor once told me “sharing is healing” and encouraged me to open up even when it was hard. So I shared my story in a room full of Peruvians in a house I used to have sleepovers in when I was younger. As my Peruvian momma sat on the couch with some Americans who were a mix of friends and strangers, I tearfully shared what I had to say to this room full of people while holding hands with a Peruvian girl I had just met minutes earlier. When it was too hard she literally supported me and encouraged me to keep speaking because, sharing is healing.
While my story, has been hard, painful at times, tumultuous and scary, it has also been a story of the friends who rallied around me and my family, and that makes it beautiful too.
The years following our return from Peru are blurry. My mom and I were shuffled around to different homes where people gave us food, cooked for us, let us use their cars, gave us a car, paid for me to get a license, let us live in their homes so I could finish high school. I had makeshift fathers who helped me with math so I could try to graduate. I had friends who gave us small notes reminding us that it gets better. We focused on getting through the day, not the culture shock. Did we sleep at all in those two years? I remember us closing our eyes and praying for it all to be a bad dream when we woke up. But we got through those years and we’re still getting through it. Everyone was right, time slowly heals things and sharing is good despite how painful it can be.A community houses you and feeds you and loves you when you are unable to love and care for yourself. They remind you to eat and they buy you a shelf to put clothes on so you can finally stop living out of a suitcase. I’ve spent 9 years trying to figure out how to thank the people that took care of my family during our hardest heartbreak. But there are no words to thank these people. I have started endless letters that attempt to show my gratitude, but every time I start these letters I end in tears, by myself, in disbelief of all they did.
I moved to Tennessee on my own years later, my own escape from what I thought was a hard and painful city. I jumped into somewhere new, this time without my mom. I fell hard and fast. Tennessee taught me lessons the hard way and I had no community at first. I spent the first year in a small apartment, crying myself to sleep and waking up with headaches and migraines, confused about why I ever thought I could do this. But then I thought about those years with my mom and sister. I knew if I could get through that, I can get through this. And with my community, I did. Again, I was housed and fed to escape from a crazy roommate. I was rescued when my car broke down, time after time. These friends also sat through the discomfort of my story. As life got harder in Tennessee they stayed by me and supported me.
Community is friends helping you move out of an apartment, friends who help you take down the trigger warning sign from your front door and celebrate your first day in therapy. It’s friends who drink with you after heartbreak and then hold your hair when you are sick from said drinking. It’s friends who make sure you text them the location of a first date, who say, “Finish the drink and give the guy a chance. Not all men suck.”
Community is who shows up without being asked. When accepting help is hard for you and they know it. I thought a community was something I would never have because we moved too much. But I realize now that I did have a community. I had many. I had an international community, a Minnesota one, a Florida one and a Tennessee one. I’ll never be able to fully thank the people that have helped me and continue to help me when life just feels too hard, but I will forever be grateful.