When I first started teaching I met a teacher named Hannah. She could only be described as a WASP and only after I realized she was engaged to a doctor, owned over 40 cookbooks from our mothers’ era, and didn’t plan on teaching after she started having babies. That was never an option for me and Hannah introduced me to a world that others would find common. One day she told me that she had an event to attend on the weekend for the Junior League.
“The Junior League? What’s that?”
“It’s a group of women who do good things for the community,” she said. “My mother always told me that when you move to a new town you find the Junior League and you join it.”
That didn’t help any because when Hannah talked about those women I knew it would be another sect of society in which I did not fit. I kept searching.
Another teacher told me I should visit her church and that seemed a little more welcoming than joining the Junior League so I went one Sunday and my kids enjoyed themselves so I stayed. I lasted about 8 years there before I grew tired of hearing things from the pulpit that I could have heard on Oprah but not before I met some truly wonderful people. I also met some truly awful ones. Worse than I’d ever met. One of them was the minister’s wife who embodied just about everything I imagined the Junior League would be. That’s an unfair assessment since I never once visited the JL, but I’d heard enough of them talking about their “work” to know it wasn’t going to be a place of comfort for me.
When I was 10 we moved from the city to the suburbs and I went out right away and started making friends of the kids I met in my neighborhood. Some of them were older than me and my shy sister eventually took them as her own. She’s not shy once you get to know her, but she didn’t feel comfortable going out and being vulnerable enough to play double dutch with some strange kid. I made the friends and brought them home to her and then she claimed a few of them.
That girl grew up and lost her way until she got lonely enough to ask people what they did to make friends.
Then I met Allen, the janitor who became a prophet in the most unlikely of places.
He challenged me to grow and get outside my comfort zone and he was, by all accounts, not who you’d want the Junior League or your Women’s Group members to be seen with you. Especially if you were trying too hard to fit into a group that worked equally as hard to not allow you in it. But, that’s a story for another time. It’s a story for the book I’m writing.
Much of what I learned from hanging around someone that society deems worthless, like many people did with Allen, was that people are food. You have your healthy food people and they’re good for you, but you might not like the look of them at first. Then you have your garden variety junk food people. Those are the ones who fill you with empty calories and give you a sugar buzz but, ultimately, have no nutritional value. When you crash with them, you go down hard. They take a lot of energy to process, but then weigh you down and fail to give you anything to pick you back up again. I liked Hannah when we spent time together at work and traded ideas about how to get students to work in the classroom and when we created bulletin boards together, but I knew that was where this relationship ended.
I tried joining mom’s groups only to find myself devoid of anything in common with women who merely complained about their children or how hard it was to be a mom. Victimhood doesn’t sit well with me. I thought they would be more about being a better mom but instead they wanted to sell me their Mary Kay cosmetics or scrapbooking supplies. The struggle to fit in with these women usually left me feeling like a snob. I didn’t want to be that person expecting too much from other people. But I wanted deep conversations and most of the ones I had in groups I had joined had the depth of a paper towel.
What I was looking for was healthy food friendships. People who would challenge me and run in their own direction. A lead dog, not just a part of the pack. Looking for healthy food friends means that you go through a lot of people and sometimes you have to let them go. At church we found two other couples who I thought would be that for me, but when they fired off blasting emails to me about leaving my marriage I knew they were junk food, too. The healthy food folks continued to elude me until I stopped looking altogether. Then, of course, my tribe was revealed to me and I started meeting people, not just women friends, who had a bite to them. They filled me up and supplied energy. I devoured them and analyzed how they were healthy food to me.
Did they accept and listen as much as they talked?
Were they unafraid to call me out when I needed it and do it gently and generously?
Did they give me something to chew on and hold me to task for the things I verbalized?
These people are my tribe, but I had to dwell on the types of people I wanted to meet by being a part of a tribe that wasn’t yet developed. I couldn’t build that tribe because I wasn’t someone who knew well herself well enough. We’re all searching for that community to which we want to belong instead of creating that community organically. I couldn’t choose my tribe because I hadn’t committed to who my personhood was. I wasn’t even letting my own soul breathe because I was busy being defensive about how no one let me play with them. My dwelling on how they wouldn’t let me be myself actually made me stop being myself. That’s awfully tiring. When I met Allen, who looked homeless and scraggly all the time, I worried about people seeing me with him and then slapped my own self upside the head and gave up that ghost.
What’s important right now is that my tribe is expanding and I’m being a little nicer to myself by not judging as harshly, but I’m also working on meditating on that person I want to be. I knew who that girl was who felt like she didn’t fit in, but she didn’t have to grow up to be a woman with those exact same insecurities.
Be who you want to hang out with and stay stuck on that path. The tribe will find you. You know why? Because they’re on it, too.
Kelly Wickham is a writer, educator, and speaker who’s writing has been featured on Yahoo! and the Huffington Post. She’s been a guest on NPR, speaks at blogging and education conferences, and pensMocha Mommaand Babble’s Mocha Momma Has Something to Say. Kelly also is the Social Media Director for Little Pickle Press and has a thing for writing manifestos that rally the crowd to rally themselves. Connect with Kelly at her About.me page, and on and .
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