Finding Your Tribe
I need to say this. I wrote this not as advice, but maybe as a reminder: Find your tribe. They exist.
Lately, I’ve felt this overwhelming sense of my authentic voice slipping away. Conforming to suit other people’s needs, wants, and desires. Every damn time I left my own on the table. I feel manipulated by culture to feel lonely. So, let me explain why.
Let’s start with the current state and then we’ll take a step back into human history.
As Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and their predecessor apps took on shape and form, we learned one thing — we are craving connection. Human connection.
During COVID, we really craved this social need more than ever. It determined the content strategy for new apps like TikTok. The entertainers emerged, the artists. When adversity hits, the artists come to express their message of hope, dispair, disdain, disbelief, and some comedy (thank goodness).
In the summer of 2020, I can remember sitting on my crescent’s curb, keeping a safe distance in order to chat with our neighbours about the state of the world and commend the healthcare workers. We were lonely. Cozy inside our self-made newly renovated pods, but lonely. Craving this social connection to have a conversation over coffee and walk in the park together. Instead, I was yelling across the street as my neighbour described the treatment she underwent for breast cancer. This wasn’t human. Then, a phone call from another neighbour about the loss of her husband. There wouldn't be a funeral. How could she properly grieve? Instead, she undertook a kitchen renovation to keep her mind off of things.
Some of us took to social media to vent, to connect, to look for our people. A few times, we think we’d find them and then in typical “Jerry Seinfeld” pattern, we’d look for faults. Deeply diving into the lives of someone thousands of kilometres away.
We were looking for our tribe. And we still are. We always are.
As humans, we’ve all originated from tribal families, communities and common thread.
We spread our families out to span across a nation, or over oceans. And this is nothing new. Especially for those coming from nomadic tribes.
Along the way, we have adventures together, face adversity (or adversities, would be more like it), lose some of our tribe, gain some new members, witness suffering, experience heartache, feel joy, and not appreciate the things we should have appreciated at the time. But we do this together for a reason, we are social creatures and our survival is dependent on this connection.
Our whole lives are spent finding our tribes and for some of us, we never find them. Or we lose them all.
In our social media circles, we search relentlessly for a tribe that doesn’t exist or we reach momentarily, only to have the algorithm re-jigged and messed with. Billionaires own and control the apps. In all of this online-tribe-searching, we forgot who we were and we’re more disconnected than ever. We’ve disconnected from ourselves. Or denied our authentic selves. We donned outfits, performed, used filters, facades, and told stories from our imaginations, and it became a pile of data to the billionaires. They know every move we make, especially with our dollars. In all of this, we lost our ways. We lost connection while they got rich. Think about that. They found a way to profit from a pandemic, in a round-about way.
For me, I need to step back from the hype. Instagram became a place to sell and market to one another. It feels icky for me to do this, and it always will. I’m shifting gears. I’m giving myself what feels right. This is giving peace to my mind. Leaving the inner circle with valuable information, joy, happiness, an ‘aha’ moment, and no salesmanship. I can’t do it. It has never felt right to me. And lately as I squirm in bed writhing in something that isn’t fitting within me, it came to me. Tribe. My tribe doesn’t need to purchase my attention. I mean sure, I run a business and that’s my livelihood, but I mean on my virtual soapbox.
Ok, so I am getting to this: my capacity to care about how perfect things are in my captions, photos, and graphics is going out the window. I’m done with it. I’m done with tiptoeing around the webisphere in the event someone’s feelings get hurt by something I say. Those are not my people. They are not my tribe. I’m here in this lifetime to spread a message (I guess. It feels that way, so I’m going with it). Expect from me: food, nutrition, human health, stories about heart-warming parts of life, human stories, nutrition, holistic health, plants, herbalism, botanical medicine, art, creativity, nature, and of course our animal friends we share this planet with.
Lately, I’ve seen a shift. Connections are emerging. For the reason of a flag, border, or common interest. What I’m afraid of most is that the connections will fade. Not that billionaires will dictate the method in how we speak to one another. No, I’m scared we’ll once again do this over and over again - become complacent and lose interest in each tribe member. Let’s not do this anymore. Let’s stick together. Shift tribes when you need to.
You belong in my tribe if:
🧬 You love science
🧑🏼🎨 Create art
🐄 Love animals (all of them)
🌞 Can feel the sunshine on your cheeks and feel gratitude
👋 Care about all humans on the planet, even if you wish some would leave and colonize Mars and never return to Earth
🌱 Love eating plants
🌸 Love to learn and grow together
❤️ Feel a sense of belonging after reading this
You can find me here:
