On the edges of community
I’ve been thinking about what it means to want connection but feel drained by it. Lately, I’ve been sitting with some difficult questions about community.
Community is something I deeply value—it’s tied to my African spiritual beliefs and to my sense of what it means to live well. But I also have needs that seem to clash with the ways community is often imagined or practised. I get overstimulated. I need time alone to recharge. Social interaction, even when it’s meaningful, can be draining.
That tension between what I believe in and what I can physically and emotionally sustain has left me feeling like I’m failing at something essential.
I started noticing how certain posts about community online would trigger something deep in me. A sense of guilt. A feeling of failure. Shame, even shame for not being more involved, for not responding to messages quickly, for not attending things as often as I want to. Shame that my wellness needs don’t let me engage in community the way I imagine I should. There’s a constant push-pull: I want to pour into others, but I don’t always have the capacity.
A recent in-person conversation helped me unpack all of this.
A friend asked a simple but striking question:
“How do you build community while preserving your sense of self?”
And then:
“How do you feel about being alone?”
“What does community mean to you?”
That opened up something for all of us. One person shared how, as someone from a marginalised background, they’ve realised that they can only truly connect with people who share their core values, especially anti-capitalist ones, and who have a certain level of emotional intelligence. You can compromise on taste in music or TV shows, but not on emotional depth or politics. Still, even with those standards, they felt emotionally undernourished. Like they weren’t being mirrored in the ways that matter. Their needs were rarely fully met. There was grief in that. A grief about not being fully seen.
Then we talked about neurodivergence. About overstimulation. About needing time alone. About the feeling of not fitting in, and the exhaustion of masking. Even in neurodivergent communities, if you’re also seeking alignment on values and emotional safety, the number of people you can deeply connect with becomes very small. That narrowing can feel like another loss.
When it came to being alone, I said that I enjoy solitude. Most of us in the conversation felt the same. But that raised another question: how do you stay connected to yourself and to others, when your wellness needs require more space than most community structures typically allow?
One of my friends’ friends said something that stayed with me.
She said, “You can build community through your values. You can live your politics, honour the collective, and show up in ways that make sense for your energy.”
That was a shift for me. It helped me understand that I don’t have to be constantly plugged in to count as “in community.” Sometimes building community looks like:
Participating in mutual aid when I can
Supporting policies that align with my values
Leaving a gathering early when I feel overstimulated
Taking a long time to reply, but still caring deeply
Resting when I need to, without guilt
Your politics can be communal, even if your energy is limited.
Your wellness doesn’t make you less connected.
She also reminded us that degrees of community exist. Just like we have different types of friendships, we can hold different layers of connection. We might be close to a few people, and more loosely connected to others. We can be part of a group, a union, a collective, not always front and center, but still meaningfully there. Still contributing. Still belonging.
That reframing helped me breathe.
I’m learning to sit with the tension between my values and my wellness needs. Not to erase it or fix it, but to make space for it. To soften around the idea that community has to look one particular way. That I have to perform belonging, or prove it.
We don’t have to burn ourselves out to belong.
We can redefine what community looks like, and build it in ways that nourish us too.