Who Are My People?
I love my people.
Who are my people? My people are the ones who I turn to for support, whom I look to for guidance, and whom I share a great many commonalities.
I have found the majority of my people in the SCA. Twenty-six years in the Society for Creative Anachronism has introduced me to a lot of people who are as into history and fantasy as I am. My geeky tribe, frequently of fellow misfits.
Yes, I was one of those dorky/geeky kids in High School who existed either in the choir room, on or behind the stage, never amongst the popular kids. I played no sports, my friends and I played Dungeons and Dragons. I didn’t drink alcohol, but I consumed an ungodly amount of Mt. Dew. My letter jacket was for letters earned in choir and theatre.
In college, when I moved halfway across the country, I made a good circle of equally geeky friends. I also discovered the SCA, but didn’t truly dive in until I had graduated. But when I did, I found my people.
I have previously written about the difference between persons and people. While today I am referring to my people, they are my persons. They are not the random world population that can often be incredibly frustrating. My people, however, might not be your people. By the same token, your people might not be my people.
This harkens to my favorite George Carlin routine about stuff. Your stuff is stuff while other people’s stuff is shit, and vice versa.
Our people are like our stuff. While we might have ever increasing circles of people, not all meet the same criteria.
Variations of my people.
There are several thoughts I have on how I categorize my people. There are those I am closest to. These are the people I want to spend the most time with, and whom I share the most about myself with. We have connections on a lot of different levels, and I would move mountains for these people.
Then there are the people whom I consider friends, but am not as close to. There is still a great deal of myself I share with these people, and I care about them as well. Our connections are likely fewer than those I am closest to, but I would still take a great many actions for these people.
After that, there are the people whom I may not know as well, but share a commonality with me. Some are SCAdians like me, and we have the hobby we participate in in common. We may only be friends on social media, or we may only encounter one another at events from time to time, but we do not really know each other well. These are still my people, overall, though while there are actions I will take for them, they are fewer.
Along the same line are the writers I know. I am a part of several different writing communities online. Because we all strive in the craft and arte of writing, we have something pretty amazing in common. We share ideas and tricks and standards for our writing on a large number of different topics. Mostly we only know each other online. Yet these are my people, overall, and there are things I will do to be of help to them.
Why do all these people matter?
As I work on crossing the bridges between the worlds I perceive, some real, some imagined, recognizing that my people are rather numerous can be a huge source of hope.
Hope matters, particularly in the face of a lot of what is going on in the world around us. So much negativity, so many terrible things of varying degrees, it’s really easy to lose hope. Why bother? Will any of it matter if any of these possible worst case scenarios before us come to pass?
Yes. All of it matters. Consciousness Creates Reality. As such, if we allow ourselves to be drawn down into the negativity happening in the world, guess what we create more of? But if we have hope, and we have our people, and we can rely on our people in different ways, we can strive to manifest better.
This is why I love my people. You keep me going when I look at the negativity of the world, and I cannot tell you just how much I appreciate that. You are a source of strength, and I thank you for that.
Keep this in mind whenever you start feeling like it’s pointless. There IS still hope for a better world. We have our people, and while we cannot directly change how anybody feels, we can effect the sensitivity, and we can work to create better.
My people are circles around me, ever increasing in distance, but still counted among my people. Where my people and your people might overlap, we have an opportunity to change the conversation with a greater circle. When we can see this, we can see that hope is a good thing, and we can create almost anything we can imagine.
Appreciate all your people.
Gratitude is a major source of positivity. When we are grateful for people and things, we tend to discover more to be grateful for. Gratitude feels good.
These bridges I want to cross may be for me alone, but I never truly cross them on my own. That may be totally cheesy, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Thank you for taking the journey with you. Thank you for being my people.
As always, thank you for crossing the bridges between my worlds with me.
GOAL LOG – Week 42:
Diet: I have not been keeping track again this week.
Exercise: Fenced twice, one day with a bunch of walking, but that was it. Knee injury is still lessening my exercise.
Writing: Four blog posts, and a lot of work on the sci-fi story.
Meditation: Only two days last week, for 5 and 6 minutes.
Gratitude: I was not tracking gratitude again.
This is the fifty-seventh entry of my personal journey, the Crossing the Bridges series. My collectively published writing can be found here.
