Re-learning "community"

Confession: two decades of being "very online" have resulted in a marked loss of my in-person social skills. Since dunking myself into "real community" in a new town on a small island province, I'm recognizing anti-social behaviours in myself that I think I've been able to ignore for as long as social media offered the illusion of "community". I'm trying to build those skills back and let me tell you, it's a mess.

I have no muscle memory of reaching out anymore. I've lost touch with social cues. I feel anxious at the thought of being "perceived". Confronted with the impetus to socialize irl I'm paralyzed by the fear that I'll be too weird or too intense. Online I'm able to measure myself and step carefully, but in person I'm messy. I think out loud, backtrack, conclude, dismiss conclusions and reframe, leap at new ideas, excitedly build on them, and then catch the lost expressions on my colleagues' faces and trail off apologizing for my big energy. I walk away agonizing over the exposure of it all. My workplace has told me repeatedly that I'm too intense. I try to reassure them that I'm stable, just passionate, I try to advocate for myself and I deliver high-value projects as proof of my sturdiness, but I'm pretty sure my mode became a quiet inside joke at the office. I work from home now on the other side of the country. I mostly socialize at the grocery store. I'm planning on joining a class to meet other creatives and begin the slow process of getting to know new people. I'm terrified.

I thought I loved "being alone". I thought I was immune to isolation and could thrive anywhere. Years ago I bought a cheap abandoned homestead in the middle of the prairies, fresh off the art scene and burnt out from living as an "advocate, comedian and gal-about-town". I had engaged followings, got recognized around town, and believed myself to be "of the community", but in retrospect I was just a bratty online shit disturber who met some cool people and got popular for it. I told my Calgary community about the epic experience of my farm – the isolation and how it transformed me, describing "the indifference of the landscape", the slowness of time, my "fundamental agreement with ephemerality" (link to my other blog where I get kooky about stuff). And the experience did change me! It was a deeply valuable time. But I thought it fixed me, and now I can see it really didn't.

I do get to take credit for catalyzing a community of Southern Alberta flower farmers, though. I bought that shitbox homestead in 2017 with zero farming experience, and shared the journey of turning it into a profitable farm on Instagram and Facebook. People were intrigued and I told my story well. In 2020 I wrote a book that detailed the business elements of how I made it work, emphasizing cooperation over competition, and sold the book while leveraging the educational environment set by the most influential flower farmer at the time. I sold over 10 000 copies of my book across Canada and abroad, and now there are dozens of small scale flower farmers working together cooperatively across Alberta. I'm still proud of the advice I gave in the book re: social media, which was to never build your business exclusively on one platform. Small business resiliency leans on centralizing operations while diversifying communications. If one platform goes down you should be able to easily redirect the flow. But I guess not everyone knew that, so, the book did well. I felt like I was "in community", how could I not be? I was literally building communities, wasn't I?

Then my coparent died, and I had two months to shut it all down. The flower farming community, my customers, and my Calgary community carried me Spider-Man style through that terrible time of transitioning off the farm back to the city. My entire focus went to my kids and my new job. We had to rehome our beloved animals, including two of our three family pets. It was a long dark time.

After four years of just barely keeping it together in Calgary, the walls started closing in. Affordability. A multi-government political coup no one was acknowledging. Southern Alberta drought and water shortages. Gaza. A job telling me I didn't have a "growth mindset" and wasn't "emotionally resilient".

In early 2024, the year leading up to our move, I was working on a personal project with my brother, a data science guy. The idea was a social networking platform that tiered memberships so only institutions and businesses paid, and creators and general users could "unlock" engagement features for free through "pro-community" behaviour. The idea for the platform gelled after I read reports from an Arts research initiative demonstrating how online engagement in the Arts was declining. The reports tipped me into a rabbit hole of investigating alternative platforms for community-building, and through that process I learned about the accelerationalist movement and the wildly dangerous power of American tech.

We wrote the problem statement for the platform and a comprehensive business plan. I was insistent that venture capital have no part in funding it, and the entire platform model relied on arts and culture foundations acting as founding investors. This model was meant to imitate how traditional cultural influence has functioned (which, two years later, I have different thoughts on). Anyway we had some funder pitch meetings and got a lot of blank stares. The bump we couldn't get past was no one could understand why anyone would leave Instagram or Facebook. We couldn't prove why such a platform would ever be needed, and I wasn't ready to flush my credibility by trying to explain the existential threats of accelerationism.

When the tech oligarchs essentially pledged allegiance at the inauguration I had an existential meltdown. The platform wasn't moving forward but I had to find a solution. I could not live with the reality of our communities being held hostage by Meta indefinitely. So I feebly posted on Blogger about why leaving Meta was cool and important while my existential meltdown continued with no clear solution. I got into reading Absurdist philosophy and started telling my friends about Schopenhauer.

And then my sweet work comrade ended his life. And my workplace memorialized him as though he lived for the work he did, when anyone who knew him knew he wanted more than anything to retreat to the woods and live gently. He meditated diligently, rode his bike every day, and was quietly white-hot furious at the system. Losing him increased the sharpness of the restrictive system around me. I felt like I was drowning.

But I owned my house, and it had equity, because all those years before I made the crazy decision to buy a cheap farm in the middle of nowhere, and that sweat equity made buying a house in a stigmatized inner city Calgary neighbourhood possible. Good god, equity is a game changer. I still feel like I just barely slid under the stone door of home ownership. I know how lucky I am, and I'm so relieved I have at least one asset to leave to my kids. Being a solo parent is a lot for an existential type like me.

But energized by the equity's possibilities and the agency of it all, I started looking at East Coast properties with the criteria that only properties suited for my flower business would be considered. I did not find a realtor for myself (I didn't when I bought my farm either), because I didn't trust them to understand what I was looking for, and I find uninformed advice extremely tedious. I wrote a plan for the ideal business I wanted to run and considered location, tourism and population density in my search, and I knew what my renovation limits were thanks to my farmhouse experiences. I found a few cute spots and thought what's the harm in getting a closer look, so I started booking video tours with realtors. And from there there was no stopping me.

I found a place that looked perfect, put in an offer with lots of conditions including a thorough inspection and the sale my house, and they said yes. It was early March and I realized the markets were probably going to get wonky soon and I needed to list asap. I wanted to list by the first of April, I couldn't quite get the house ready in time, and then the April 2nd market crash happened. None of my plan was going to work if I couldn't get a certain minimum amount for the house, so I aggressively dropped the price twice before the shock waves of the crash hit the real estate market, dropping $50k in total, and we sold just in time, for just what I needed (to my cousin! My cousin who was my bff growing up who I didn't even know was looking to buy a house and she didn't even know she was seeing my house?? The confluence was incredible). When the market dropped I literally told my kids "we're going to get through this by the skin of our teeth", and I was right. But my plan to escape the claws of a paycheque-to-paycheque life that offered no desirable paths forward was in motion and it was exhilarating.

I've been here, in this double-suite Victorian mini mansion with a developed basement on one acre on the edge of a seaside city, for about seven months now. Honestly I'm still in shock. I have double the square footage of my old house, growing space for days, and my expenses are half what they were in Calgary. My kids love it here. My job let me work p/t remote and I have time to think and feel again. I'm building my new business slowly and remodelling my home with care and intention, while it's otherwise functional. The woman who lived here previously was a master gardener, which I didn't know when I bought it, and the gardens are beyond anything I thought I'd ever have access to.

And I have zero social skills. I'm trying my damnednest to exit Meta products, and the years of physically isolated farming plus the years of grief plus the enshittification of social media plus four years of holding my breath through a lifestyle I detested. Friends I have no idea. I feel like everything I thought I knew about community no longer applies. Like the mode of community-building I'm good at isn't community-building at all, it's just surviving through transactional agreements.

And community isn't an organizational brand either. It isn't "stay under our tent and we'll protect you". Not the community I'm seeking. I'm contending with the fact that I have no idea how to be part of a real-life community, I only know how to build them cleanly from a distance; the online mode of community building. And if/when online structures fail, I'm fucked. We all might be.

So I'm re-engaging with my business's Meta audience, gently trying to warm them up to the idea of following me off the platform. If all goes according to plan, my new business won't require social media to exist at all, and I'll be free. But I want more people to wake up too, so I'm thinking about how I can once again strategically leverage my journey, this time to influence people into reconnecting with the real world around them through florals, botanicals and gardening. This is my new project, the problem statement being "TOUCH GRASS. SAVE YOURSELVES".

I feel very strongly that the preservation of our collective and personal autonomy depends on being able to connect and thrive as messy, multifaceted offline communities. I know for a fact mine does, and throwing myself into this challenge – where I don't know anyone yet have the time and space I need to reset and relearn – I'm really hoping to come out the other end of it with a better sense of belonging and collective agency.

And I want so badly to help others find paths out of the soul-sucking system of transactional wellness and support systems that function more like prisons than communities.

That's where I'm coming from, and it's a journey I'll continue to revisit on this blog. Thanks for reading this. There's more coming, hold onto your butts.