Break Cycles, Build Circles

Community and Audacious Hope After the Estrangement

I’m going to be an auntie. To be sure, I’ve been an aunt since I was eleven, as is the case in big families. But aunthood does not an auntie make.

My friends P and her husband E are pregnant. I’ve known her for roughly a year and him for six months. They don’t really know that many folks here yet because they just moved to the Bay Area.

My biological nieces and nephews and I aren’t in touch. Even with the ones I was once close with, there has been distance due to my choices to estrange from their parents. Even if the emotional distance were overcome, there would still be physical distance, itself not crossable when there is emotional distance.

When I tell you I feel so much joy at the idea of being a help to this growing young family I am telling the truth. Help starts by asking these actual people in this particular family how they would most feel helped; or listening to them talk about their struggles and triumph, and making offers, and allowing them to say yes or no, and I’m only assuming that they need help because they are having a literal baby and everyone who has a baby needs help. Period.)

Being estranged from family, be it from ideology, distance, difference, or abuse (and all of the above) is not having the same access to community co-regulation-or that feeling that you get that you are held, that people have your back, and that it’s safe to ask those around you for things that you need or want (like someone to come over and rock and hold your baby while you sleep.)

Estrangement from a bio family, ex partner, or a friend group necessarily narrows down one’s circle, sometimes to a smallness that feels impossible. Yet we can slowly rebuild circles of community that create support and provide meaning and co-regulation. Slowly is key. Those of us with abuse histories can tend to overshare or take things quickly, before we feel whether the relationship feels right in our bodies.

What I’ve learned lately is that a circle can start with one person. I can be my own circle and best friend in a lot of ways (adding in pets and plants) as an adult that I wasn’t able to do as a child. That circle-of-self is the terrain of your likes and dislikes, that allows you to make better choices and recognize red flags sooner. As a person who takes time to build within my own selfhood circle, I have more energy for those I am responsible to: my partner and our children, my dearest friends, my clients. When I am grounded, there will be people those whose groundedness (or their lifelong attempts at righting themselves when toppled) shows itself to me. When I have slowed down, I notice. Then I have the one friend. A circle of two is a beautiful circle and a fine place to take it slow entering into deeper friendship.

What I used to do was go around frantically; be it at a music festival or a therapy conference, collecting friends, talking, talking, listening, taking people in, taking so much care in my conversations, agonizing about things I thought I said stupidly and wrongly. Without really examining them I would stuff the new friendships in my pocket while somewhat fawningly trying to collect more people, unmindful of the folks I shoved in the pocket who are perhaps fighting to be heard among the marbles and lint. Perhaps they are trying to escape my pocket.

I’m quieter these days. Sometimes I have to remind myself to go slow, stop talking, stop throwing out energy tentacles everywhere. But it is working. Things are quieting down, in my social circles and in my nervous system. And it’s the “love the one you’re with,” anti-fomo, stop trying so dang hard and enjoy each person as it comes that is quietening down things.

When you bring one person into your circle, which is more of a sphere, it tends to draw more people-their people. A new garden doesn’t have to be landscaped and ready for tea parties. It starts with one plant whose needs you have started to figure out, and soon, that plant thrives, flowers, and drops more seeds. If you water what is already there, it’s easier to germinate new seeds—aptly, this is called companion planting. With companionship—the right kind—you make the ground more hospitable for growth of the entire garden.