All I Ever Wanted Was Community

All I ever wanted was community. That longing might sound naïve, but it is deeply human. I entered these spaces hungry for connection, for chosen family, for a circle that could hold both my fire and my tenderness. I led with my heart—always have. That heart has carried me through joy and devastation, but it also connects me to a much older hunger, one that thinkers and wisdom-keepers across cultures have tried to name.

Sobonfu Somé, in The Spirit of Intimacy, reminds us that true community is a spiritual endeavor: a weaving of vulnerability, ritual, and collective responsibility. In her Dagara tradition, the health of the individual is inseparable from the health of the whole. Malidoma Patrice Somé echoes this in Healing Wisdom of Africa and Ritual: Power, Healing, and Community: community is sustained by rituals that reconnect us to one another, to nature, and to Spirit.

I believed that if I moved with integrity, compassion, and willingness to learn, there would be room for me. I showed up. I gave. I made space—not to earn approval, but because that is how love teaches us to live. bell hooks, in All About Love, calls this the ethic of love: an active choice to nurture growth in ourselves and others.

But instead of belonging, I met betrayal. I have been erased from spaces I helped hold, accused in whispers, and defamed without dialogue or process. This grief is mine, but it is also cultural. M. Scott Peck writes in The Road Less Traveled that true community requires struggle, honesty, and commitment to growth—but most groups collapse before reaching that stage. Instead of intimacy, we replicate domination.

The West romanticizes the “rugged individual,” Erich Fromm critiques in The Art of Loving, but this individualism breeds alienation. Families are privatized, elders discarded, art isolated in museums, Spirit replaced with consumption: I shop therefore I am. In Of Water and the Spirit, Malidoma Patrice Somé contrasts this with African initiation systems where community raises the child, and where each person’s survival is bound to the survival of all.

And yet, I kept hoping. I thought the circles I entered could be intentional spaces of care. What I found instead was conflict avoidance, gossip as governance, and safety-ism masquerading as accountability. Lee Harrington, in Playing Well with Others, emphasizes that authentic community requires communication, negotiation, and clarity—not whisper networks and silent complicity.

So no, I am not broken. I am becoming. Smaller, deeper, and more intentional. I no longer scatter my energy into spaces that treat my humanity as optional. I do not beg for belonging. I honor those who have supported me, I release those who have harmed me, and I devote myself to what Sobonfu Somé calls the “vital life force” of real community: ritual, Spirit, and the deliberate weaving of souls.

Community is not everyone in a room. It is not gossip or safety committees or charismatic leaders. It is a spiritual practice: a collective intimacy that restores, heals, and sustains life.

That is still all I ever wanted. And that is still what I am building.