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I’ve been sick for the last 3 days. I’ve also been fasting. I have 12 hours left before I break this fast, and it’s the first one I’ve ever done while sick. The longest outside of a Vision Quest and, honestly, the easiest. But I swear I kicked this chest cold in RECORD time. I have risen!

For the first time, I’m not cultivating community

You might think that sounds crazy. Why would you not cultivate community? We all need community.

If you had asked me if I would do this even a year ago, I would have told you absolutely not; you NEED people. And for a very long time, I needed people desperately because I could barely hold myself. And not even just that, I didn’t have a family I could turn to. I didn’t have a support system at home, so I needed whichever one I could get from close or distant friendships. More often than not, I was just dumping my trauma onto them. Either playing out bad patterns and habits with others who had them, or actually using them for the emotional support I didn’t have and couldn’t source in myself.

And that’s not to say I didn’t have mutual friendships, but there’s always been something wrong, at one point or another. And most of the time, I’ve just left.

And I love the people that have come into my life and who stay, but I’m honest enough now to say that much of my earlier “community” was built on need and dependency. It served a purpose at the time. It kept me afloat.

But staying in that pattern past its usefulness would mean never finding out who I am without an audience, without a container, without someone else helping me hold the weight of my own life.

And I change fast. And I need more freedom than most to be and think and evolve in a way that I have found “community” does not support.

When I was in grade school, I was known as a “floater”. Who are your friends, people would ask. And I would sort of look around at everyone. I hung out with the kids who skated and did drugs, and then the art kids who loved anime, and then the rowing team who became like sisters to me. I hung out with kids from other schools, and I am still genuinely able to connect with just about anyone. I like this quality about myself.

But what they don’t tell you about community is that it’s not always for the changemakers and the thinkers. Community is not always neutral (or beneficial) for creators and leaders whose work depends on freedom, sovereignty, interiority, and long arcs of becoming.

Over the years, I’ve attempted to understand why, and here’s what I have so far.

Community, too often, falls into several traps:

1. The Trap of Belonging: Defined by the shadow of coercion, abuse, and exclusion. Also includes “Borrowed Meaning,” where the community offers a ready-made purpose before one is capable of generating their own. Differences actually aren’t accepted as much as you think. Difference is tolerated rhetorically, not structurally. When you don’t want to go to the bar with everyone, something is wrong with you.
   

2. The Trap of Identity Fixation: When who you are to the group hardens faster than who you’re becoming. When you feel communities get stuck in their ways or thinking, this is it. When you feel like you can only be one version of yourself with that community, this is it.
   

3. The Trap of Moral Delegation: Ethics become collective instead of personal. I think this is harder in groups of women than in groups of men, but disagreements on what is good and bad can end friendships. I have not seen a group, in this day and age, that can support widely different moral frameworks and still have cohesion. This is where belonging breaks down again.
   

4. The Trap of Care: If you stop coming around, the response is often, are you okay? But solitude is a necessary practice, and often needed if you’re a contemplative or just source energy from being alone. It’s also necessary for leadership. You have to stand on your own. The community can get offended by your absence.

Let’s dive deeper.

The Trap of Belonging

In one sentence: Difference is tolerated rhetorically, not structurally (community penalizes deviation more than it admits).

Nietzsche’s critique is relevant here:

• The group enforces mediocrity under the guise of morality

• Exceptional individuals threaten equilibrium

Fromm describes belonging as an escape from freedom. Freedom can liberate individuals from external constraints, but it also can create profound feelings of anxiety and isolation. To escape this "burden of freedom," individuals often surrender their autonomy and individuality in exchange for the security found in a sense of belonging.

Even “anti-hierarchical” or “conscious” communities enforce norms. They just do it informally (or sometimes passive-aggressively).

This is well-documented in:

• Irving Janis — Groupthink

• Solomon Asch — conformity experiments

Groups systematically reward agreement and punish dissent, even when dissent is correct. They don’t even know when they’re doing this. It’s a total blind spot in groups.

And this is bad for creatives & leaders because:

• Breakthrough work starts as DEVIATION

• Early dissent looks like incompetence or arrogance

• Over time, people internalize the cost and self-censor

• Community quietly SUBVERTS originality

The Trap of Identity Fixation

In one sentence: Identity locks in before differentiation is complete (once a group needs you a certain way, it resists your evolution).

Communities love clarity, because it’s safe:

• Labels

• Roles (the funny one, the one that does anything, the one thats always there…etc)

• Narratives (“Valerie’s always…”)

Individuation requires:

• Long periods of ambiguity

• Contradiction/paradox

• Not knowing who you are yet

• Someone like this can present as unsafe

The community attempts to stabilize identity too early. It doesn’t do this on purpose, but it just does. It seeks coherence and stability, and when you are something we know and expect, you are safe. It’s not a bad thing that groups prefer predictable contributors over evolving ones. But this isn’t the reality for soul expression, soul evolution, those who are HIGHLY creative and are seeking the path of more and more freedom.

And then the problem becomes, as you change, you might have to burn down an identity that you never fully chose (or wanted). This can cause crises and wreck the system.

This is a known problem in systems theory and family systems (check out Dr. Murry Bowen’s work if you’re interested in this):

• People unconsciously stabilize roles

• A change in one person threatens group equilibrium

For leaders:

• You outgrow the role

• The group subtly resists your next phase

• Leaving becomes the only way to evolve

The Trap of Moral Delegation

In one sentence: Ethics become collective instead of personal.

Hannah Arendt warned about this directly: evil often emerges from thoughtlessness, not malice.

When morality is outsourced to group norms:

• Personal ethical wrestling declines (It’s good to ask questions! It’s good to wrestle with ideas!)

• Responsibility diffuses (Oh, that’s for those guys, we have our own thing going here.)

For leaders, this is fatal. Leadership requires lonely moral clarity. You are holding the vision, often on your own. You cannot outsource what is good and bad, right and wrong, to someone else for the sake of “belonging” or “the collective”. You cannot look beside you for the answers; you have to BE the answers. Leadership is a lonely path. That’s okay. Still take it!

The Trap of Care

We want people to care about us. We do, truly. But for leaders, for creatives, for contemplatives, care cannot suppress solitide. And those people need a lot more solitude than the current ways of “community” provide for.

In one sentence: Solitude is often framed as withdrawal rather than necessity.

Every serious individuation tradition emphasizes solitude:

• Jung (withdrawal from the collective psyche)

• Monastic traditions

• Artist retreats

• Philosophers

Communities often pathologize solitude:

• “Are you okay?”

• “You’ve been quiet.”

• “You should come back to the group”

• “Where have you been?”

Not answering a phone call, or just not being able to chat with the energy and zest you expect and have come to love in the person, disappoints and creates disconnection. If this sounds personal, it’s because it is. I owe lots of people a phone call, and I just don’t have the energy to do it.

Do I have energy to write this? Yes, it’s because that’s my design, and that’s where I actually do best. I would love to be one of those people who just calls you on your birthday and always check in and make plans to do such and such, but I’ve never been that, and it is a true stretch of my being to try to do that for everyone I care about. That sounds shitty and I can do better but I also need you to lower your expectations.

And that’s where care looks different, too. I’m one of those people who doesn’t need to talk to you for 5 years, and I can get on a call with you 5 years later, and in my mind, no time has passed. I don’t love you less. I love that we’re both doing life, and I can’t wait to share in it with you.

Final Effect of This Trap:
The very condition needed for individuation is treated as a problem.

Conclusion

Community is invaluable for healing and belonging, but individuation is necessary for originality, creativity, and leadership. Unfortunately, you cannot optimize for both at the same time.

So, I think, if you’re looking for a reason that “community” just doesn’t feel right anymore, look at how the shadows of community might be impacting you. Look at where you might be going or what you might want to do next.

I think we’ve also lost the value of the individual: the unique soul expression of who YOU are and what you’ve come here to do. You can often only get that if you start to step away. And it’s not mean, and it’s not wrong. Freedom and liberty are the conditions for bold, creative expression and leadership. If that is what you want, you got this!

Love,
Val

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