“For whoever needs to hear this, it’s absolutely okay if your village isn’t made up of people you’re related to, and if you have to build your own with the beautiful souls you’ve collected into your life along the way.
We hear so much about the importance of having a village, but so many of us are, in the same breath, admitting we just don’t have one.
It’s valid to mourn the support you wish you had. I mean that. You can hold space for all of those feelings. And at the same time know, with an open heart and a willing mind, you can reframe your idea of what a village looks like.
It’s about taking yourself just a bit further out of your comfort zone. It’s about asking the lovely person you met at a playground for their phone number because you can just sense they’re your kind of person. You need those people you can hang out with on an empty afternoon.
It’s about actually talking to your neighbors, building trust with the community around you, and making a commitment to look for it.
It’s about converting your friend’s ‘let me know if you need anything’ into something tangible… People do mean it; they care and they want to help, we just have to meet them halfway and say yes.
For such an endlessly connected world, we have never been more disconnected from each other. We live in the age of individualism, isolation, and loneliness. Pretty bleak when you put it like that, but we don’t have to accept it.
We can choose to do things differently.
We can assemble a village of people we know, and those we are yet to meet…
One brave conversation at a time.”
This story was submitted to Love What Matters by Suzanna Moore Jones. You can follow her on Instagram and print her poems here. Submit your own story here, and be sure to subscribe to our free email newsletter for our best stories, and YouTube for our best videos.
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