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I recently finished the third and final season of Reservation Dogs, a series that I highly recommend. The writing and acting are excellent and there is a sense of magic-realism running through the show that is played both for laughs as well as some dark and serious explorations of Native experiences. At its heart, the show is about community and connection, even as characters need to grown and change and explore both themselves and the world. The final episode focuses on that and, to be honest, brought both joy and pain to my heart. Joy for the characters and the story, pain because I long for community, yet have never really had one that lasted.
I do have some important friends scattered around the country that I know love and support me. I have one very important and intimate relationship here in Little Rock as well as a few new acquaintances and growing friendships that have begun since moving here in 2023. I also have some social media connections that are supportive and meaningful to me. What I don’t really have is any sense of a community: of being part of something larger than myself. Community takes time and effort to build, and, to be honest, I did not always yearned for it in the way that I do now. Or, at least I was unaware of that importance of that desire for much of my 20s and 30s. So I didn’t make it a priority when I was younger.
Now I’m about to turn 55 and find myself struggling with a sadness that emerges from a lack of community and the care that community offers. If there was one piece of advice I could give my younger self (well, apart from “let yourself be a girl, damnit”), it would be this: “start building a community now and find a place and a group of people to ground yourself, to care for, and to let yourself be cared for.”
I am trying to engage in communities more these days and will continue to do so and will work to build more relationships in my life. However, I do fear that I will never have even a fraction the sense of community that Reservation Dogs evokes. Part of that is my distance from any concept of heritage, but a large part of it is that I never settled or found a place to be or to ground myself.
While I am currently in Little Rock AR, I fear that I have yet to find that place because the south will always be a strange land to me and New England my home. Yet, even if I could move back to the northeast right now, the place might be more right but I wouldn’t necessarily have more of a community than I have here.
I struggle onward. With more clarity about the importance of community in this world, but without a sense of it. Perhaps I will build it. Perhaps I will find it. Perhaps I won’t. If you are reading this, I urge you to be thankful if you feel you have community. If, like me, you don’t have one, I hope you will start making community a priority if at all possible. As the world collapses, it will be ever more important to have, find, build, and hold onto.