When I picked out my two words from Brenè Brown’s list of values, I chose Courage and Connection.
Connection. In which I really mean love, family, friendship, and all the unbreakable threads I can tie from my heart to another. Connection, where when some threads snap and recoil to whip across my face I wonder if I’m doing it right. I get shaky looking at my frayed strings. This doesn’t feel like Connection. Nor Courage.
Here is what I really mean. When I was a Resident Assistant in college I was on a team of twenty responsible for running a dorm of 700 students. We put on educational and recreational programs, we counseled freshman and sophomores, we stayed up until 5 am managing another dorm sprinkler flood or the drunken wreckage of a Halloween weekend, and we got woken from our sleep by the obnoxious, blaring on-duty phone’s ring and handled whatever incident or emergency the building and it’s students could throw at us.
It was emotional, exhausting, exhilarating work that we all balanced with being full-time students and our own early twenties growing pains. For almost any incident, we were in teams of threes. We never went into any situation alone or at a minimum, got back up soon after. We dealt with panic attacks, and suicidal ideations, and roommate spats, and the anxiety of checking the communal bathrooms and showers on weekend 1 am rounds. That’s where shit really goes down.
As a team, RAs had each other’s backs. We had drama, as any group will, but collectively we shared a set of values and standards of taking care of our building and our students that I believe set us apart from other campus dorms. Our Residence Directors (RDs) led with the philosophy of hiring good humans and then teaching the job.
In that environment, our personal emotional health and our connection to one another was vital. We needed to trust one another to do this job. At the end of the two-week training before the school year, we overnighted at a retreat organized solely around team building. As a nighttime activity, we broke up into our small teams and got real with each other. Our RD would ask a question and we would all sit in a circle and answer. Some questions were light, to warm us up, but this was the kind of circle where a few people usually ended up in tears.
What is the color of love to you? Who do you admire the most? What do your friends love about you? What is an event in your childhood that profoundly shaped who you are?
And on and on. We shared stories of losing people, loving people, giving up and getting strong. It was vulnerable as hell.
In the TV show Voltron: Legendary Defender, the five paladins do a mind meld exercise, opening up their subconsciouses to synchronize as a team – an essential component for them to perform and survive in battle.
That’s what that night felt like. A mind meld.
There’s an Ao3 tag called “Team as Family”. It means that a group of unrelated people – perhaps strangers at the start – become as close as family to one another. Irrevocably connected.
I think those two years as an RA were the closest I’ve gotten to “Team as Family.”
When I say Connection, that’s what I mean. A community of hearts threaded together where I am woven into the tapestry.
I’m struggling with this right now and frankly feeling naive. I’ve been trying to develop this same environment and culture at my work for nearly five years and I thought I’d done it. But work can be fulfilling with amazing people and yet and yet and yet . . . it’s not family. It’s not unbreakable. It’s not irrevocable. I don’t think it’s supposed to be.
After all, most people have actual families and partners at home. A business can be values and mission-driven, but come on, this isn’t Voltron. We’re not in it, ride or die, to save the universe.
So. Then. Frayed string in my palm.
Life continues to be a series of choices. This or That. Him or Her. Here or There. And all you can do is make the best choice you can and hope you’re on the road you’re supposed to be on. But if you don’t believe in fate . . . and life is about the journey, not destination . . . well . . . I guess I keep believing I’m choosing connection but . . . am I?
There’s a passage from Blue Lily, Lily Blue (the third book in The Raven Cycle series) that haunts me:
“But what she didn’t realize about Blue and her boys was that they were all in love with one another. She was no less obsessed with them than they were with her, or one another, analyzing every conversation and gesture, drawing out every joke into a longer and longer running gag, spending each moment either with one another or thinking about when next they would be with one another. Blue was perfectly aware that it was possible to have a friendship that wasn’t all-encompassing, that wasn’t blinding, deafening, maddening, quickening. It was just that now that she’d had this kind, she didn’t want the other.”
That’s what I mean.
With Love,
Natalie