introduction
I’ve spent most of my life surrounded by very similar people. Even through location and life changes, most of my closest friends have always been Korean American children of immigrants who grew up in the Korean American protestant church. This is a very specific demographic of people--but they are people who share some of my most salient identities with me. This community has been crucial in my identity development, in finding a sense of belonging in a society that Others me, and in just offering support and companionship and fun.
But over the past few months, I’ve been grappling with a difficult feeling that I need to leave it. Throughout college, my values, identities, and personality have grown and changed--but my community has mostly stayed the same. In these last two months of undergrad, I’m struggling to deal with this dissonance and my constant existential need to challenge myself, while spending these last moments with the people who I love and who love me. I’m torn between wanting to join a more intentional community and challenging myself to turn my existing community more intentional.
I figured there’s no better way to unpack such complex thoughts and feelings than to write about them. So in this memoirette of my communities through different eras of my life, I ask myself: why have I stayed with the same type of community most of my life? And what am I craving for by leaving it?
My bread and butter throughout college has been analytical writing about social justice topics. But I wanted to get a little bit more personal for my capstone and experience the power of a narrative. Although a memoirette on community may not seem directly related to social justice, so much of myself and my story is, so it inevitably appears. I keep coming across research like Kemper’s power and status theory of emotions, which says that changes in power and status lead to positive or negative emotions, and that these power dynamics are relational (2006). I don’t like this but I don’t disagree: I definitely have felt anxiety when my status decreases as another’s status increases. But social justice appears most directly in my project in the form of me wanting relationships that are more equitable, inclusive, and challenging.
“The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.”
Pablo Picasso
In this way, I hope to join a larger narrative conversation about community, identities, intention, and their interactions, hopefully aiding others in their own pursuits of self-awareness and in thinking about their place in different communities. How do communities form? What might relationships untainted by power relations look like? Where is the balance between the individual and the collective?
I’m far from concretely answering these questions, but I hope my story can provide some guidance towards your own truths.