to cocoon, to build community, to step into the spotlight.
“The thing people don’t always realize about leadership and change-making is that it’s a step-up-step-back situation. Sometimes being a leader means stepping back to help others step up. But sometimes that also means stepping up to be in the spotlight yourself.”
“I think growing up in a domestic abuse situation, attention was always a negative thing. So I’ve been behind the scenes always trying to shy away from the attention and now I’m trying to work on thinking that maybe attention on me, maybe the spotlight on me doesn’t always have to be a bad thing.”
“But that’s the thing I want you to realize. You’ve been the light, so now you deserve to step into the light.”
About a month ago, I sat in my office building next to Jamiel, a friend and also one of my favorite activists, as we discussed the life circumstances of poverty, houselessness, and domestic violence we’d experienced—and how these experiences had led us to a path of servant leadership and community building.
That’s when he reminded me that stepping into the spotlight doesn’t always have to be a bad thing. If you’ve done the work in your life, then you deserve to help others do the work—and sometimes that means stepping up front and center in a way that makes you feel uncomfortable. I felt cracked opened, like a whole new world had been served to me on a platter with words I didn’t know existed. When he said this to me, I suddenly felt a huge weight lift off my shoulders. I think I had been waiting for someone to tell me I deserve to step into the light in this way my whole life, only I hadn’t known it.
Nearly two months later, last week, I found myself in a giant room of hundreds of young people from the five boroughs in a city campus, there to hear from people seemingly wiser than them about what it takes to survive in the world. As my life would have it, I went to this event to attend and support Jamiel, but was thrown into the deep end of the pool when he asked me to get up on stage and talk, and then to lead a session talking about inequity in the world and coming from poverty, houselessness, and domestic violence. Of course I couldn’t just be told to step into the spotlight, now I was being pushed into it by someone who wanted me to see I could shine and it would be okay.
While the day was somewhat of a flurry of anxiety, it was also a reminder that I have things to say that actually are helpful for people to listen to. I think we all do. But we forget that when we step away from the spotlight, from saying the things we know in our hearts matter, but that we tell ourselves would be silly or egotistical or unnecessary to share. After speaking, many teens came up to me and asked me how I do what I do. I didn’t really have an answer for them other than that every day I wake up and get out of bed, I have to believe that I have something to give to the world that somehow only I can give.
Me with an amazing crew of people from Opportunity Youth United, an organization I do work with to uplift and take power back for Opportunity Youth (or young people who have been disconnected from pathways to education or work by inequity in America) shortly before we took to the stage to give keynotes and facilitate sessions with young people.
I’ve spent a lot of time in my life thinking about the things that get each person out of bed in the morning. One of my majors in college was Religion, and I religiously (ha ha ha) studied concepts like evil surrounding subjects like the Holocaust or forms of terrorism, things that should, for all intents and purposes make us stop believing that there is something Good and Holy out there looking out for us.
If all of these horrible things happen in the world, if there’s inequity, if there are systems meant to hurt and torture people and tear people from their families, keep people in poverty, put them in prisons, take rights from people, how can anyone believe there’s a God to pray to? I’ve written one too many research papers on this alone, and I don’t feel the need to rehash it here, but I will say that in all my studies of religion and belief in the years of my life, I’ve actually found that to be a beautiful thing—whatever it is that wakes you up and inspires you to leave your bed in the morning, that’s your God. Whether it’s actually a God, a Goddess, your friends, your job, the city you live in, your daughter, your son, your sibling, the sunset.
For me, it’s community that gets me out of bed in the morning. Community has meant many different things to me in my life, especially because growing up, I was a loner, not because I wanted to be but because I was forced to be. I moved around a lot growing up to the point where one year I realized that until high school I hadn’t attended the same school for more than a year in ages. I had no childhood friends I’d grown up with, no traditions, no familiar routines but being dragged along by parents who were always fleeing something.
I was not always this way—someone who’s full of hope, joy, conviction. I am often made fun of for it, or receive snide comments about my naïveté. But it doesn’t bother me, because I know that my capital J type Joy is hard-won. Now, years later, I am a person who has built community from the ground up, like a weed that knew maybe it was meant to be a vine. Friendship is the most sacred place of worship to me, my love languages my pews, the meals I cook for friends my communion, our long talks late at night our confessionals.
I have always been a person with a lot to say, but for most of the first eighteen years of my life, there was almost no one to say it to. I was trapped in whatever room was mine in whatever house or condo or apartment my parents had moved us to, kind of like Rapunzel or Harry Potter but not at all romanticized, not at all fantastical.
I’ve done a lot of thinking and reflecting on why I have such a hard time navigating when I deserve to and need to speak and step into the spotlight and when I need to step back, and I think it makes sense that the meter is rusty from not being able to speak or share my thoughts, feelings, opinions, and ideas with anyone for fear that when I did, I would be yelled at, silenced, mocked. Learning when to step back and shut up, when to step forward and into the spotlight has not been easy, mostly because I had no compass for it.
I became fearful that I’m too much. So apart from talking with teachers in elementary school and then high school, I didn’t believe I had anything that anyone would want to hear, anything inside of me that, if I brought it to the outside, could be nurtured. I spent the first part of my life living mostly in silence, out of a spotlight, biting my tongue, with my only understanding of attention as something negative.
So I self-sabotaged any chance I got. Some of it was most likely subconscious. Some of it was intentional. I pulled myself out of the game and put myself on the bench with any opportunity that came my way, because the spotlight was scary, and the narrative inside my head told me I didn’t deserve community, or to see the light of day, or that it was all too much to handle. The outside world is scary, and it’s so much easier to stay hiding inside of myself, isn’t it?
Then, something changed. I wish I could tell you what it was. Maybe teenage rebellion. Puberty. Perhaps all the Nirvana and Foo Fighters I listened to. Suddenly, when I entered high school after a bout of homeschooling, I wanted to stop living in my deep dark cave of depression that I’d built for myself. I wanted to see people and I wanted to be seen. Desperately. I wanted to know what it felt like to have a friend group. To have plans on a Friday night. I wanted to be cool. I wanted to be quirky. I wanted to be liked. I wanted to be heard.
At first, I started out in theater because that’s what I knew. There were three things I’d done all my life to cope—acting, playing music, and writing. It felt only natural to seek community in a place where I could also bury myself in other selves—put on a costume for a bit and disappear into a new life, a new character. That one didn’t work out so well because… well, if you’ve ever been in theater then I’m sure you know, a lot of people there are kind of assholes. They’re dramatic. They gossip. They treat the world like it’s a stage and if you’re not a cool, leading role, well you can just get out pal.
So I left that community and tried my hand at music. I joined advanced choir, which was nice, but felt too much like competition and I didn’t want to go up against anyone else for the lead solo, I wanted to sing with other people. I wanted to hear a haunting cacophony of the mixture of many voices and what it sounds like to soothe the world with music that comes from the depths of your soul, and your throat (that’s what she said??)
Then, finally, my sophomore year I found and created a real community for myself for the first time in my life. While I’d searched in many places high and low for a real sense of belonging, I hadn’t found it until I started going to Da Poetry Lounge in Los Angeles. Da Poetry Lounge, or DPL for short, is a magical place and one of the oldest live poetry forums in the country. It was started by incredible black slam poets who took all of the good and all of the bad in the world and put it into words that make you want to clap, to dance, to start a revolution. It’s a small blackbox theater in the middle of Los Angeles where hundreds of people cluster together each week, waiting with baited breath to hear words that make you feel seen, even in the midst of a nearly pitch black room. The best part of it is that it’s not all professionals. It’s an open mic, so on any given night, you can go to hear people who have never spit out words in their life to the next person on stage being someone who has won ten awards and fellowships and has been focusing on this craft for twenty years. Being in this room every week was the best thing that ever happened to me. It saved me from myself. It saved me from the shipwreck that my life felt like and often was because of abuse and neglect. It gave me a place to call a true home at least once a week.
Every Tuesday night I would show up like clockwork, taking an hour-long bus ride from West LA to Hollywood, spending all night somewhere that felt like what people told me of church. I basked in the words of poets and creators more brilliant, bent by life, and experienced than me, and found home in the wreckage of my messy words and feelings. Sometimes I dragged friends. Most of the time I went by myself. As the years went on, I made friends there. People I stood next to in line in the warm California sun every week, people I sat next to in the same seats, people who came to me to tell me that my dedication to showing up again and again, whether to listen or speak, inspired them to write a poem. I met poets I’d admired for years or weeks or months: Shihan, Yesika, Javon, Phil, Sarah, Anis, Mayda.
I learned how to be a part of something for the first time. Mostly, I learned that community is how you become yourself. That there is no self in isolation.
Finding community in poetry let me find community in other words and places, namely my high school newspaper and my staff there. I started out doing photography and writing small articles, then became an editor, and then editor-in-chief my senior year of high school. Here’s me and my staff in our branded shirts my senior year.
Baby editor-in-chief/news editor Elly!!! Moving is a gift, y’all, there are so many treasure troves in boxes like your high school yearbook.
By the time I was 17, after a lifetime of being a vagabond (a word and concept I was deeply obsessed with for most of my life because I so badly wanted to put a positive spin on the difficulties of being carted around), I had built a real routine for myself—something and somewhere that felt safe, stable, and there for me.
On Tuesdays I would stay at school until 7 or 8 PM to get the paper done and sent to the printers to be distributed on Wednesday mornings. I would sit in a dark, cramped office with my team on the top floor of the journalism building, sometimes with Papa John’s barbecue chicken pineapple pizza, soda, and snacks, writing about how reverse racism doesn’t exist, or slut-shaming, or politics, or trying desperately to get my fellow students to care about more things going on at our school. I would share laughter and tears with the other editors on my team, bang my head on the keyboard when InDesign acted up, and feel deeply touched and amazed to be a part of something so small and special. Then, I would run to the bus to make it to another part of the city entirely for poetry.
While the community aspect of my school paper and the poetry community was certainly a coping mechanism to escape a tumultuous home life, it was also about more than that—it was the act of creating a found family, building a world where I belonged and felt needed and wanted in for the first time in my life. It was the pivotal time in my life that made me become addicted to building community no matter where else I went.
So I did it everywhere.
When I went to college and fled 3,000 miles away to New York, I produced feminist shows on campus and made the casts and crews and rehearsal spaces a place for queer people to talk about identity, family, shame, hopes, dreams, fears. I helped to create and run the literary magazine and English club on campus. I became a Resident Assistant and joined another team of people who spent many late nights working on bulletin boards and community programs and ways to get residents to talk to us (Free condoms or free pizza? Board games or bad movie marathons?)
No matter where I went, I needed to feel like I was part of something bigger than myself. In many ways, I think we all do this, whether intentionally or not. But oftentimes I hear people classify themselves as being needy or co-dependent for wanting to create or be a part of those communities in the first place.
While there’s something to be said about taking space for yourself, learning to form your own opinions, thoughts, feelings, and goals apart from others, and not making any one person or community your whole backbone, I don’t think of it as anything even close to weakness to have that innate desire for belonging, or to give into it and devote your life to building community. For all intents and purposes, let’s say we truly are animals born to compete and out-survive one another as evolution says. Doesn’t that make it even more beautiful, joyful, and special that we’re brought into this world with an inherent fear of being wiped out by something stronger or smarter than us, a fear of not adapting, so we cling to others and invent love and affection out of thin air to find an excuse to keep existing? (If that sounds corny, its because it is. But if there's anything you should know about me by now it's that I don't mind being a bag of popcorn or a corn tortilla or perhaps a corn pudding if we wanna get Southern.)
Over the last few months, I’ve talked a lot with my therapist about coping mechanisms I have now that were rooted in trauma but that have become a habit of joy now, instead—cooking, for example. Cooking, began as, obviously, a means of survival for me as a kid when my parents couldn’t or wouldn’t cook for me. It became laborious to feed myself or to learn how to cook new things or rely on microwaved meals when I was too tired to. But then, as time went on, I began to find great joy in learning new recipes, learning what I did and did not like to eat, what ingredients mixed together did and did not work.
Through love and labor, I was able to change an action and routine rooted in hardship into something that is now an act of self-love and nurturing. Creating community in various places, like cooking, started as something of a survival mechanism—a defense to feel less alone, less unwanted, less lost. I sought out and created community whether through clubs, poetry venues, newspaper staffs, friend groups because I was terrified of being on my own and worried I did not belong. Community was the thing I clung to tightly to shield myself from my great vulnerability.
Now, I’ve transformed my love of building and stepping into communities into a deeply positive, securely-attached practice. Being part of community is no longer about shielding myself from vulnerability. It’s about stepping into it. It’s about recognizing that I belong deeply to both myself and others, whether I’m on my own, texting in a group chat, or physically in a community space. I have built communities with my own love, my own two hands, in small ways and large ways. A few weeks ago I went to the wedding of one of my best friends from college with another one of our best friends from college and I honestly haven’t been able to stop weeping looking at the pictures of baby us vs. adult us, tired from debt and life and full-time jobs but still with so much love for each other in our hearts.
Us at our friend Sydney’s house junior year of college dressed as our most embarrassing middle school selves for a themed party vs. us the other week at her WEDDING (where I definitely sobbed eight times during the ceremony, had to put my hand over my mouth so as not to disrupt, and cried with her parents).
And the communities that I’ve been welcomed into and created in New York, my home, since I moved here years ago for college, have transcended any gift in life I could have ever imagined, literally—because growing up I could not have imagined that someday life would include gaggles of people waiting to cheer me on, either from the sideline or the same lane as me, whether ahead, behind, or moving at the same pace. I could not have imagined people who would gather with me for impromptu picnics at the park, invite me to beautiful and intimate Shabbat dinners with live music and salt from the dead sea, to housewarming parties where I feel full of good food spreads I helped a friend to make and so alive, friends who travel 3,000 miles across the country from LA to Brooklyn and spend the day with me and still want to help me build a bookshelf in my new home even though they were on a plane hours ago, friends who will travel with me, go on hikes with me, or even help me move and pack and unpack and pack and unpack again during vagabond-ish times like ones I’ve recently had.
“One of the biggest misconceptions about self-care and balance … comes from the idea that it can only be accomplished in isolation. In fact, community often plays a vital role in helping healers refill their own cups,” my friend Cameron wrote in her article on who heals the healers this past week. And it made me think about how we often think about life in terms of a sort of dichotomy—that you have to prioritize yourself or prioritize others. That you can’t do both. But you can.
As Cameron reminded me, loving and taking care of others is often a necessary step in doing so for yourself, and vice versa. But so many people are stuck on feeling like their give and take in life, with the people they love, with the communities in their lives, is a tug-of-war game of who can do the least. I’m here to say that’s not love or community—that’s ego. “No one loves me” and “I don’t have good people in my life I can rely on” and “I only have time for myself or time for others” are all things rooted in the misunderstanding that life is about you. Life is not about you. Life is not about me. Life is about living it and building it together.
If I sound like the inside of a Hallmark card, I’ll live with it. Because what I’m about to say is a little less hashtag internet deep and little more nuanced.
I’ve spoken to a lot of people and had a lot of people angrily reply to my Earnest Tweets about finding people you love who love you with cynicism about how finding people who make space for you is a nice pipe dream but it will never happen for them. If that’s you right now, for whatever reason, I see you. I understand that you have been hurt by people or have been abandoned or have not yet found places that make the word “home” mean something. I have been there. But I am also here to tell you that lack of hope and cynicism are often lies our minds spout because we are scared. What good could ever come from isolating yourself and telling yourself and others that you will never find love and community? What good could come from getting up again tomorrow and trying to find it or build it? What bad could come? Sure, you might face rejection. Sure, you might find that this community or that community isn’t right for you. But at least you will have tried. And as cliche as it is, the only way to find what does work is to find what doesn’t.
I truly believe in my heart that every person on earth (and maybe Jupiter and Mars too (hey I'm not in the business of excluding extraterrestrials) has the power inside of them to make friends, find or create community. To build the life they deserve. I think that starts with other people giving you the opportunities you need and deserve. I also know it starts with you.
Last week, at the event that my friend Jamiel pulled me into, one of the keynote speakers was John Henry, a person who now hosts a show on Viceland and worked his way up from poverty. He told a story about how when he was younger, he started out as a doorman. He didn’t have the best attitude. He wanted better in life. But he noticed that other doormen didn’t learn the names of the people who walked through the doors, they didn’t make conversation beyond ‘hello.’ And he noticed that it frustrated people. So he tried something new. He learned people’s names and remembered their dogs’ names and kids’ names, and before he knew it, people liked him and thought well of him, and he was working in costumes on the set of the Wolf of Wall Street.
If that feels like an extreme jump from one place in life to another, that’s because it is. But it’s one of my favorite stories I’ve heard recently of where kindness and an open mind about what it means to build community will take you. Sometimes, quite literally, the best way to open doors for yourself is to open doors for other people. To be kind. To pay attention to how you talk to people. To understand that, much like you, everyone else just wants to be seen and heard and loved. To have someone know them, ask how their day was, and listen. To do so for someone else.
Many people don’t seem to believe that making friends or getting places in life is that simple. But I’ve seen time and time again that it is. The building blocks of the universe seem small and feeble, like those cardboard boxes painted red and blue and yellow that you used to make castles or houses with when you were little. Or maybe you used the plastic ones. Either way, you wouldn’t use those to build a real building, would you? Well, you would. The building blocks I’ve used to create a full life for myself are the same ones that my pre-school teacher Peggy told me. The rules of life, my friends.
Be kind to others.
Listen as much as you talk.
Don’t treat anyone the way you wouldn’t want to be treated.
Clean up after yourself.
I know it sounds silly, but honestly? These are mainly all you need to build the life you probably want. They’re what I’ve used. Humility. Kindness. Thoughtfulness. Desire to learn.
I will tell you now that the only reason I have so much love and community in my life today is because of the self-work I have done. I was once a depressed, anxious teenager who had experienced so much trauma that all she wanted to do was hide in her room, listen to angsty rock music and feel angry at the world. I couldn’t make friends because I didn’t believe I deserved to. I couldn’t go out and face the world because I couldn’t face myself. It was only when I tried to consider that maybe the joy that the world had tried to take away from me was so deeply mine and that I so deeply deserved it and could choose to go out into the world and try to give some of it back to others that I started down the road I’m on now.
Let me toss another metaphor at you, because I am who I am, and this is one I have thought of my whole life. Caterpillars. Pretty cool dudes, right? They’re born as these long fuzzy little bugs and they crawl around and they eat leaves and enjoy sunlight. They hang with other little fuzzy dudes. They think that’s what life is. Then they start cocooning! I can’t be sure if caterpillars’ brains are programmed to help them know exactly what’s going on, or if they’re totally in the dark (ha… ha, get it? Okay bad pun, moving on now, I know you’re shaking your head at me Jamal and Caitlin), but the age old wise line does go, “Just when the caterpillar thought its world was ending, it became a butterfly.”
So what does this have to do with community and finding the places that feel like home? Well, if I’m not thinking of myself as a vine using the “barriers” seemingly in its way to grow further towards the sky, I am often thinking of myself as a butterfly. Or a caterpillar. Something or someone in a cocoon. And I believe we all are.
If you are not where you want to be in life, if you have not yet found a community that has welcomed you with open arms, if you have not yet created the person you ultimately want to look back at in the mirror or whose thoughts you want to be yours, it is okay. You are not yet a butterfly. You are a caterpillar on its way to cocooning, or in the midst of your cocoon. Your world is not dark. You are in a dark place and the world is vibrant, beaming, alive outside of the cocoon. When you emerge, it will quite literally be a new day. You will try to crawl out and instead, find that you’re flying. You will spread your wings and know how to use them. You will talk to yourself and know how to be kind. You will meet others for the first time and know how to say the thing that makes them think That person would make a great friend!
You will find that the whole world is your community, your cocoon.
On Monday night, I found myself at poetry in the park right by the Brooklyn Bridge, one of the most sacred spots in the world to me, at a poetry salon hosted by one of my favorite poets, Angel Nafis. There, I listened to Willie Perdomo and Franny Choi, poets who helped to shape me during high school and make me believe there was something that was more to this world than my own pain. There were words and people who cared, and there was something to do with all the feelings. It felt charmed at least and serendipitous at most to be able to sit in a place that means so much to me, enjoying the cool summer breeze, intensely feeling the sweat collect at my back and on my chest, to hear words shouted and tossed across the East River like a symphony calling back to my past self, who didn’t know where she was going or who she would be. A shout into the void of myself that somewhere, years from now, on stone steps in New York City, we would become who we wanted to become.
Franny Choi, one of my favorite poets whose words have raised me for the last ten years, given me hope time and time again, kicking ass as always and being openly queer as hell at the Greenlight poetry salon in Brooklyn Bridge Park earlier this week.
While 2019 has been tumultuous for me so far, to say the very very least, it’s provided me with a lot of ideas about how I want to grow, what growth looks like, and who and what I need on my journey. During our conversation last month, Jamiel said something that’s stuck with me.
Life is a climb. Not everyone can handle the altitude. If you wanna go fast, go by yourself. If you want to go far, you bring your crew.
This life has indeed been a climb. But if there’s something I’ve been reminded of by so many people I love lately it’s that the journey is about going far, not fast, and it’s about bringing others up with you. So open your eyes. See that we are all cocooning. That we’re building wings to fly. That the whole world is our community. And, as both Jamiel and my favorite books from childhood, The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings series taught me, that we are on the first steps of a long journey.
Who are you bringing with you?
Sincerely yours,
Elly