‘cause this is all about.

The truth — the honest to God truth — is that I don’t really envy people much, but I do envy people who have a sense of community.  Which might be weird coming from me because I tend to land on the more misanthropic end of the social scale and there’s no question that I’m introverted, but, as I get older, if there’s something I’m learning to value, it’s the need for community.

But, when I say “community,” I’m not necessarily talking about a huge group that could fill an entire neighbourhood but really just a circle, even a small circle, of like-minded people with similar values you can trust, not only with yourself but with the things you love and are passionate about — and I do actually quite emphasise the latter, simply because I know too keenly how lonely it can be to love something or be passionate about something but have no one to share that with, no one who’ll reciprocate and understand the things that make you tick.  Sometimes, I actually think that similar values are great and all, but, goddamn, sometimes all I need is someone who reads the books I do and listens to the music I do and can sit with me over a cup of coffee and talk about them — and it’s a lot harder to find people here who listen to the same music as I do because K-pop might be spreading faster than I care for but K-indie/rock?  Ha, good luck.

Anyway, community is nice.  Commonality is nice.  Finding both requires a measure of making yourself vulnerable, which, in itself, is also kind of nice.  I’m learning that there’s a lot less to fear about making myself vulnerable than I thought; I’ve been remarkably calm since sending out my first manuscript; and I’ve also been surprisingly unfazed by cold-calling in law school, even when I was called on over a case I hadn’t finished reading.  As I grow older, I’m learning that the only thing really to fear is the fear I drum up in my head — the world isn’t nearly as scary as I let my imagination convince me it is, and I credit quite a bit of this change to backpacking through Japan and getting myself to Korea this summer because, as much as I did plan for my trip, a lot of it was simply throwing myself into a foreign country without knowing the language or even working out a lot of the small details (like how the bus/streetcar system works or how the JR Pass actually functions).  That’s just who I am — the girl who glances at a map, gets a general bearing of how to get to where she needs to go, and just launches herself in the general direction and laughs and curses at herself when (and it is when not if) she gets lost.

(My mum and dad actually laugh about this odd streak of fearlessness I seem to have [I tend more to write it off as thoughtlessness?  I hate sitting and mulling over things, even if I do it a lot; I hate myself for wasting time mulling], but I’ve also learned as I got older that my parents do know me better than I liked to think they do …)

But, anyway, back to community — community is nice, and I’m trying to find my own community out here, and I’m also grateful for the community of people I’ve met on the Internet because I’ve met some awesome people via the Internet, particularly when it comes to music!