Connection
: the importance of finding your tribe :
Before I begin today’s post, I completely forgot to choose a winner from the book giveaway in the The August Collection. I used a handy-dandy random name picker, and Rebecca H. is the winner! You’ll receive a copy of a new book I read called A Sea Between Us by Yosely Pareira and Billy Ivey. Congrats—I think you’ll love it (I’ll be in touch for mailing address)!
Also, in this week’s Midweek Musings, I talked about jean-shaming from Elevator Man and asked you to stand with me in solidarity with photos of your distasteful attire. Chelsea R. emailed me her “forbidden jeans.” I told her I’m sure those would have elicited a comment about a weedeater, but she felt certain Elevator Man would say these were caught in a garbage disposal. Indeed!—thanks for sharing in the fun!
Now on to this week’s main event!
I’ve just finished reading 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff, a story of friendship that began with a NYC freelance writer’s inquiry to a used bookstore in London in 1949. Correspondence between Helen Hanff and the book dealer continued for twenty years:
“Through the years, though never meeting and separated both geographically and culturally, they share a winsome, sentimental friendship based on their mutual love for books.”1
Have you ever had a book grab hold of you and refuse to let go long after the covers are closed? It was pure magic for me—delicious descriptions of secondhand books, laugh-out-loud lines, and a window into the events of that era.
The collection of letters was a glimpse of humanity and how we connect, which has always attracted and fascinated me.
In a previous Midweek Musings I wrote:
“Lately, connection has been a big thread in the world around me—I’ll be writing more on that soon, but I recently read a post that talked about addiction being a problem with connection rather than being a disease. I don’t want to get into my thoughts on that theory here, but I don’t disagree that people struggling with addiction have a more difficult time in the absence of social connection.
In Jonah’s treatment program, this brotherhood is a major component of recovery…”2
For our new subscribers (welcome!), Jonah is my nearly-21-year-old son who is in recovery (3 months!) in a residential program for drug addiction.
For a long time, especially after his older brother gravitated toward activities with high school friends, Jonah was a bit lost. He had no issues meeting people or being likeable, but he just couldn’t figure out how to lead the life he was meant to live3, which attracted people who made it easy for him to think it was okay to try x, drink y, or smoke z. And then because of the shame and guilt he felt from his actions, he fell into a spiral of connecting with no one. He was without a tribe.
In that post on brotherhood, I wrote about how he is bonding with others who share his struggle with substance abuse and want a better life. He’s connecting, tethering, finding his crew.
We can all find ourselves at a point of isolation, even if we are constantly around people. Have you ever felt really alone? Like in a place where you feel forgotten or invisible? I’ve gone through a few periods like that, but along the way, thankfully, I found my tribe—the connection I need sometimes to bring me back and remind me I’m not alone.
I met two of my best friends 22 years ago when I moved to a new city. We were all in the throes of raising young children, and we became comrades in the battle. As the years rolled on, the attachment endured as we committed to growing our friendship despite busy lives and even some separation by miles as two of us moved away.
For several years now, we’ve lived close enough to schedule dinner every month. Without fail, we show up, we eat, we laugh, we cry, we rant, we hug, then we set the date for our next dinner.
Between those dinners, we stay in touch through a group text. Three months ago I was messaging my tribe to pray for my son. Three weeks ago there were texts flying about cancer, dental crowns, and colonoscopies. And this week we’re celebrating some of our children’s’ wins in their grownup jobs.
The problem with life in 2022 is that connecting with another human in a meaningful way (or connecting with the right humans) can be really hard. And the more we fill our days with endless scrolling and consuming, the less likely we are to engage in healthy ways with others.4
So how do we connect? How do we find our tribe? How do we begin to build the bonds that will last?
I personally believe in asking God for everything I need—my daily bread. My first connection each day has to be spiritual. I don’t think I’m alone in this.
The deeper I have grown my connection with God, the more He connects me with the right people. When we moved to our current town, I was meeting lots of people, but I didn’t feel very connected to anyone locally. So I prayed, “God, show me my community.” And He has.
Even when we don’t ask, He sometimes give us connections to remind us that He’s there. Randall over at Thanks for Letting Me Share wrote this recently:
You’ve heard about my ridiculous higher power communication infrastructure and how it relies on pennies and playlists and balls passing through hoops and all sorts of other nonsense that I’m too embarrassed to tell you about. You’re right to be skeptical.
Except for the first time in a very, very long time, it all makes sense. When I’m doing the right things, on the right path, I just know now. I know because someone will say exactly the right thing to me at the right time, or a pressing concern will suddenly resolve, a new opportunity will present itself, a new person comes into my life. These things all happened before. I just didn’t understand what they were or where they were coming from. I certainly didn’t understand the messages that were being sent. When I was in early sobriety (roughly the period between 2010 and 2020), I would speak about God showing up in my life. My hubris and arrogance kept me from seeing that God didn’t just show up. God had been there all along, I just hadn’t been listening."5
God knows what we need, when we need it. We just have to be willing to connect to Him so that He can connect us to others.
Last year I sent this passage from Live in Grace, Walk in Love by Bob Goff6 to my very independent brother7, who was just a couple of months into his leukemia diagnosis and learning how to ask for help and rely on others:
“God made us to need each other. So if you’re stuck or tempted to live in isolation because it seems easier, think again. You need a community to get there, not more time alone. Think bus, not unicycle.”
He promptly replied: “Sometimes that bus gets noisy!”
True. That bus can get quite noisy and be filled with a bunch of imperfect people (I mean, that’s our nature, right?). But I think Sean Dietrich (aka Sean of the South) said it best when delivering advice to an 81-year-old woman who wrote him that she was having trouble finding friends in her new assisted living home:
“You probably want a friend who is an exceptional person. Someone who will be there when you need them, who listens more than they talk, who shares the same ambitions, who has a good sense of humor.
Simply put, you are looking for the perfect friend. Who isn’t? Someone who will be there through wind, rain, sleet and ACC Championship losses.
Well, listen to me clearly.
You’re not going to find the perfect friend because outside of a Jane Austen novel, they don’t exist. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.
What you WILL meet are imperfect people. People who will disappoint the Swiss cheese out of you. People who will let you down. Because all people are, by and large, extremely screwed up. Especially columnists. It’s just part of being a hominid.
So why not make friends with screwed-up people? Make as many friends as you can. Say yes.
Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not saying you have to be BFF with everyone, but you can become PGF (pretty good friends) with hundreds of people who will love you dearly…”8
So, if you’re feeling a little lonely today, say yes and connect with another human. Shannan Martin wrote about what can happen when you dare to say yes:
“A couple weeks ago my friend Karen invited me to take a painting class with her, her sister (whom I’d never met) and our mutual friend, Jen. After decades of adulthood where I often felt medium-lonely, particularly after moving to Goshen and the relational fall-out, I learned to say yes without hesitation because I knew I needed some long-haul, come-what-may community. We had a really fun evening together! It always feels good to be included. Let this be our nudge to widen our circle of belonging, quick to include others.”9
Maybe you can connect over a shared love of an artist at a concert or gallery (Matt Anderson wrote a great post about that over at The Spittoon10).
Perhaps you’ll connect with someone over food as Abby illustrated in a post at Dinner: A Love Story.
If you are homebound, perhaps you can launch an email or letter to someone you just met or form a virtual book club (for inspiration, read 84, Charing Cross Road!).
Just get out there, somewhere, anywhere (except maybe those places with No Trespassing signs…don’t go there). You can't connect with people unless you are communicating in some way with people.
I know the bus gets loud, but I promise there are some awesome people on that bus. And if you need to break out the unicycle every now and then, that’s okay (we need to balance social time with solitude, too!). Just don’t forget that there’s beauty, healing, love, and story in connecting with others.
Your tribe may be twenty or two. They may be just like you or as different as rhinos and ostriches, but life is just better with friends.
Let me know how you are connecting this week.
From the back cover blurb.
You’ll find this phrase crop up a lot over at Thanks For Letting Me Share, courtesy of Tommy by way of Randall.
There are definitely ways to connect digitally. Here I’m referring to our tendency to cordon ourselves away from the world and consume movies, shows, reels, etc., without engaging in conversation.
This is an affiliate link, and there are others in this post. This means that, at zero cost to you, I will earn an affiliate commission if you click through the link and finalize a purchase.
If you’re reading, yeah, I’m talking about you again.
https://seandietrich.com/dear-sean-80/
What else does Matt write about?
“America has a drug problem.
At the dawn of the millennium, an estimated 17,500 were dying of drug overdoses each year. Unfortunately, that number has only increased in the last two decades. Based on the latest data available, we are close to (if not over) 100,000 deaths per year.1 But this newsletter isn’t about numbers. It’s about stories.
The Spittoon is a place to collect them.”
Thanks for sharing!
Such an increasingly important topic these days. I had all but given up on finding a virtual community of people until I came across Substack. It didn’t seem feasible—everything seemed too fleeting.
I’m glad I was proven wrong.
I like your writing (or I would not have subscribed), but I have a different take on "tribe". As teens, we engage in a desperate search for "tribe", which often (not always) can lead to misery, insecurity, and bad influences, and also walls us off from everyone not in the tribe. I have become a much happier person over the years in large part by expanding my "tribe" to include a wider and wider variety of people, such that the notion of tribe has very little meaning for me any more. I suspect humanity would be much happier overall if we understood that we are all the same tribe. Which would be another way of saying we have outgrown the notion of tribe altogether.