I am sitting in my garage with noise cancelling headphones I borrowed without asking so I can focus on preparing a presentation on community.
There is less than a week to prepare for a 90 minute presentation about how to form a community through compassion, curiosity and acceptance. I want to blame my ADD, the fact I have children and many, many other distractions like squirrels and the furniture I’m wanting to refinish, but I cannot blame my lack of focus on them because that isn’t what this is about. Instead, it is pure avoidance.
This idea of community has me frozen because I am not sure I know how to create a community. I have had accolades about what a great community One Tree is and people have commented, “look at what you’ve created.”
And, yes, I “built it” and “they came.” Or, rather, a “we built it” and “many came and many left”, because that is what people do. We constantly enter and exit our lives and our communities. It gets confusing because I want to believe there is a heaven-like, everlasting community that is perfect - one that no one will ever want or choose to leave. A commune that is not a commune filled with only joy, peace and light. In this life, I might add.
In other words, what I want is that no one will believe I’ve done a poor job leading my One Tree community this way or that. I want all to believe One Tree, or the community of which I now am trying to lead, is, well, heaven-like. Magical. Perfect in all its ways. That I’m perfect in all my ways.
That’s where I get stuck. I am not what everyone might think I am, and now I am supposed to talk about how that is okay. It’s okay for people to leave. It’s okay for a community to expand and then contract. It’s okay that one community is not a good fit, but another is. It’s okay if someone doesn’t like the choices I make as a leader. It’s all okay. It is just that it doesn’t ever feel okay. It hurts.
This is not a new feeling. It’s a deeply ingrained part of who I am feeling. I can go into details about how my childhood experiences created this monster within me that likes to show up right when I need to focus on the task at hand: to prepare to tell people things that appear “wise” about how to create or lead a community.
But, I have abandonment issues. Twenty-plus years of therapy have not rid me of them. This rather expensive and time-consuming therapy has only brought these and many other issues to the surface where they now live, versus being buried deep down in the depths where I couldn’t recognize them for what they were. Keeping these issues buried is what allowed for my flight instinct to kick-in so I could abandon before I am abandoned. Or my fight instinct where I change like a chameleon into what others seem to want me to be. Fighting meaning I fight the urge to flee by adapting to all those around me.
Neither tactic has served me well, and both of which are part of my deep-rooted abandonment issues - that of abandoning myself.
Right now, my flight instinct is feeding my avoidance of preparing. I’ve run the gambit of excuses about how to get out of this thing I signed up for. This thing I chose. Abandon before anyone can abandon me, before the audience can walk out.
I’ll work on a PowerPoint and then find myself trying to adapt the presentation to what I think people want to hear versus what I’ve learned over the years: Community building is hard work. The hardest of work, most of which is the internal work of knowing thyself. No number of googled “community building activities” make this work any easier. More fun sometimes, but never easier.
I am no good at being around others, which seems anti-thetical to the idea of community. This may surprise some (or all) of you. I walk into a gathering or stand before people for a presentation and have to work like hell to hold myself together enough to stay put and to not flee. It’s uncomfortable. It sucks.
Although medication and continued therapy helps tame that innate desire to flee, it doesn’t make it disappear. It’s not that I’m not good at my job or that I can’t present before a group of people in an auditorium, because I am mostly good at what I do and I can give a pretty decent presentation. I am aware I possess some strengths alongside my many, many imperfections.
Now, I’m a part of another community: a new job. I’m the Director of the Lower and Upper Elementary at different school.
I’ve only known how to be in charge of making sure the community at One Tree doesn’t fall apart. And now, I’m helping make sure the same of this new and different community. One that is equally precious and equally a mess because it is a community of beautiful and messy humans. Myself, one of the messiest of the crew.
Here I am, avoiding while processing through writing all this. What I’d rather avoid is the all to familiar pitfall of waiting until the night before to get it together or, worse, emailing the conference organizer to say “Thank you for the opportunity, but I’m out.”
To you who are reading, I will say, “I’m out” because I must focus on preparing this presentation.
Thanks for reading.
