3 Ways to Navigate Making Connections in a New Reality
“Like many of you, this last year has kept me asking, ‘How do I muster up the energy to build community when it feels like so much has been taken from me?’”
Photo by Janelle Pol
I moved to New York City in January of 2013. As I stood in the cab line, I breathed in the air of expectation, along with the stench of curbside trash and cigarettes. I didn’t care. I was in the greatest city in the world. And being the extreme extrovert that I was, I knew first on the list of NYC musts was finding “my people.”
I quickly met a native New Yorker whose demeanor disoriented me. Though the relational basics were there, she seemed intentionally distant and removed. When I finally asked about it, she said, “After you see enough people move away, the weight is too heavy to rebuild.”
In my blissful newcomer trance, I attributed her attitude to grouchiness and moved right along with the naive presumption that my story wasn’t going to look like hers.
But then… the years got harder.
Friends that were part of my journey into adulthood started moving away. Older relationships became more difficult to sustain. My church saw two painful moments that tore the congregation apart. And finally, after eight years of being deeply embedded in my church community, it closed down.
Just like that, I felt it - the weight of rebuilding was too heavy.
There’s an old saying, “Don’t kick a (wo)man when they’re down.” Yeah. This all came to a boiling point in February, 2020. Cue the global pandemic.
Like many of you, this last year has kept me asking, ”How do I muster up the energy to build community when it feels like so much has been taken from me?” You, like me, might be painfully aware of your fragility. You might be wondering how to bear so much grief and uncertainty while still holding onto hope. I hear you. I want to suggest a few things that have been healing as I’ve navigated making connections in this new reality.
Let go of expectations
One of my favorite reads on community is Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In it he says, “The person who loves their dream of community will destroy community, but the person who loves those around them will create community.”
Oftentimes, the first step in community is letting our idealized dream of community die. Then, with both a realistic view of the world around us and a sense of wonder, we can begin to love the people who are right in front of us.
Learn how to move towards people, even when it's hard
Growing up an extrovert (with some family trauma mixed in), I’ve always been welcoming, but cautious. I love being around people, but my heart also beats to the drum of “don’t stand too close to me” long before 2020. Making friends has been easy, but letting those friends see me cry, not so much. It wasn't until I was able to understand and actively work against my relational distance, that community started to make so much more sense.
Let me give you a quick example of how some sense of disconnection may get an early start. If you have a background in therapy, you might be familiar with the term "attunement." In short, attunement describes how sensitive or empathic a person is to the needs of another. For instance, a well-attuned parent won't just react to a child, but will respond with appropriate language, tone and behaviors based on the child's personal state. At a very young age, children respond well to adults who are clearly both sensitive and responsive to their needs. This enables them to understand that their parent is someone who is safe and takes their needs seriously.
We all had different childhoods, experiencing a wide range of parenting styles and levels of attunement to our needs. After all, even parents with the best intentions are never perfect. If you didn't have a highly attuned father or mother, it's possible that relationships with others might unintentionally connect you to similar feelings of unmet hurt, longing, and loneliness. These feelings could have stirred up in childhood, or during challenging interactions in your young adult years. Regardless of the initial moment, we've all been hurt by others. It takes great courage, awareness, and strength to push past feelings of resistance and let people in.
Your story of relational intimacy might look entirely different than mine, but it's vital to remember that we each carry a wide range of experiences that have shaped us and can influence the ways we invite others into our lives. In order to bring our whole selves to relationships, it can be helpful to recognize why we might be putting up barriers to close connections with others.
Let yourself linger
I love the definition of linger: to stay longer than necessary because of a reluctance to leave. At first glance, it might remind you of that person at a party who carries the small talk far past an appropriate point. But actually, reluctance to leave is usually tied to the expectancy of something good.
What if the places you move to and from each day have community already built into them? What if community is all around you, and all you have to do is move slowly enough to realize it? If you’re a Christian, you probably relate to this when you think about Jesus.
Jesus wasn’t flashy. He didn’t have a Google calendar planning each moment of the day. He was intentional, deliberate, and attuned to the people directly in front of him. In the Bible, we see many examples of Jesus meeting people who were barren, broken and unqualified in so many ways, and he responded with sensitivity to their needs. And if you’re a follower of Jesus, you can likely agree that that’s how his presence still meets you today. He meets you in your lack of resources, your desolate places, and your overcrowded thoughts. And he doesn’t just meet with you; he lingers. He wants to stay.
As soon as I also gave myself permission to linger with those around me, I started seeing it. My barista wasn’t just someone at my coffee pit stop; she was my friend who taught me off-the-menu orders. My neighbor wasn’t just the girl next door; she was a fellow puppy parent who helped me raise my energetic goldendoodle. My church friend that always seemed like a fair-weather girl became one of my closest confidants. And it all started when I began asking myself, “What could happen here if I wasn’t so quick to move along?”
How about you? What does it look like to linger? How can you start embracing people in front of you? Let’s start with something simple. What is your barista’s name?
Michelle Velberg is a leadership coach and the Director for Cru City Embark, an organization focused on helping twenty-somethings discover their place and purpose. Having held previous positions in Marketing, Investment Banking, and Consulting, Michelle loves helping build a vocational story in line with the Gospel. In her free time, she is an avid runner, Enneagram fan (8w7), and devoted dog mom to her goldendoodle, Ruby.