everyone is annoying

...including you

(ok ok, hear me out, sweet people 😂) I know this isn’t the way I usually title or start these emails to you, but I hope you’ll bear with me.

As I’ve been working in response to the election the last couple of weeks, including getting the neighbors on our block together to figure out how to share resources, working with my quaker meeting to figure out how to respond to all the needs that will be amongst us, and walking with my neighbor to a local community-wide group of folks showing up with what we have where we are, I remembered this thing I learned about community over these past few years. A rule, if you will: Everyone in you are in community with is annoying. Including you.

Now, obviously nothing is true 100% of the time, but I feel pretty sure about this one, borne out of long years of community building through my parents’ church, with many gripes about the most annoying among us, long years of working collaboratively with people (god, is there anything more annoying), and years of organizing in person and online community groups (enough said). Everyone is annoying. People are annoying! We have weird beliefs (that we really really want to tell you about and get mad when you don’t want to hear). We talk too much. We never talk. We think we’re better than other people. We act like martyrs after creating the very situations we want sympathy for. We get uptight when the dishes aren’t done the way we want them. We never do the dishes. We process differently than each other. We can’t get to the damn point. We can’t see the big picture. We have to talk for one thousand hours before we decide anything. We leap into action without checking in with the people who will be affected by our actions. (I could really really go on like this for forever, all my gripes I’ve been holding onto for years like a dragon, treasuring my horde of complaints). Everyone is annoying. Everyone, fucking everyone! Which is satisfying and superior, until we remember that everyone includes you.

You (and me) are annoying. We are annoying! (See above list if you don’t believe me.) To someone, you are the most annoying part of their week. You (we) can’t even help it!

This may be an apt time to just remind ourselves that I’m not saying that annoying is bad. Why is that important? Because many of us, especially in groups, want to be good. We want to be shiny and special. We want to be adored, or at least liked. Even better if we’re liked more than other (annoying) people. We want the status that comes when we line ourselves up and find ourselves just a little bit better — more palatable, wiser, more thoughtful, kinder, better at community, suffering more and complaining about it less — than that joker over there. Community as we’ve learned it, is so often a status game, a zero-sum puzzle that we desperately want to end up on the right side of. A binary, if you will, or perhaps an arena for us to perform being on the correct side of all the binaries.

Sometimes I talk to people and they have this reverence for nonbinary approaches. (And they are pretty great, in my annoyingly humble opinion.) But nonbinary approaches can also be infuriating as hell, because if things like the good/bad binary don’t really exist, then there is no way to be good. And if there is no way to be good, then we’re spending a lot of time and energy…to end up in the same boat as everyone else. Annoying the hell out of each other while we all wish we’d pull our elbows in a little bit more and that whoever ate tuna salad for lunch today didn’t.

Personally I have been finding the annoyingness rule really freeing. I used it the other day when I was working on a project with someone whose brain works differently than mine and who needed or wanted to talk out every step before we even started. I could feel part of me muttering louder and louder as the time went on, just do the thing, stop talking about it, let’s just do it and the process will figure itself out. I knew in my body it would be true that if we just started, the next right step would appear. And the thing is, I wasn’t wrong. There wasn’t any way to map it all out for certain. But I wasn’t right either. I wasn’t smarter than that person. I didn’t have more skills. I wasn’t contributing more to the project than they were. So I took a deep breath when they wanted to redo something over again that we had just decided and done, and said to myself, everyone is annoying, including you. And it helped. We did the thing for another neighbor who I also find annoying at times. She baked us vegan cookies and they were the best thing I’ve ever eaten. Because if everyone is annoying, and I don’t have to slot people into good people I want to be associated with and bad people that I don’t have to care about, there’s just people. Who care about each other, or don’t, but who still need things like food and water and a place to stay warm and connection when we’re scared. I don’t deserve those things more than other people. Even people who are freaked out about me being queer or nonbinary. No one does. We spend a whole lot of time pretending in our culture, that it’s ok to throw some people away.

Ok some of you are holding really valid questions and critiques in your mind as you read this like, what about racism, or transphobia, or general fucked up behavior? What about harm or hurt and the totally unspeakable trauma that we create for each other? And to that I say, yep. We live in real fucked up cultures that spend so much time cultivating conditions for those things to thrive, and in some cases praising people for doing fucked up shit to each other. It sucks. It really really hurts. We definitely don’t spend enough time holding how true that is and how powerless we feel on a day to day basis about how much violence and bullshit there is in the world. And, I still don’t think that the good/bad binary is going to help us get out of that. I don’t think being better than other people makes hurt go away. Or ends fascism.

And that is perhaps the most annoying, tender part of it all. Here we all are together. How might we be to build the world we long for together?

Thanks for being here. I’m grateful to you, however far you made it.

sending love from the creeks, who are rarely annoying to me personally,

Kali