Notes from Jesscamp2

exploring polycentric pluralistic belonging at a week-long gathering of friends from twitter

Earlier this summer I spent a week in a Black Forest hotel with 75 tenderhearted nerds from Twitter. I had an extremely good time. I've spent the last 6 weeks wondering how to tell the story, but it's so hard to write, a million layers of meaning densely woven together, almost impossible to untangle into standalone stories with tidy morals. So I'm trying a new experiment: instead of a story I've made some kinda vignette collage, pages cut-and-pasted from my daily journal.

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Jesscamp has begun! I went to bed last night very happy. Of course, it took a minute for me to warm up. The first couple hours, awkward forced humour, shallow interactions, trying to jump ahead before we'd established any genuine rapport. But it kicked into gear after dinner, after the opening ceremony, especially the conversation with [redacted] and [redacted]. I felt so delighted to be able to accelerate into the modes and content of conversation that are most interesting to me.

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The group has a spirit all its own, comprised of parts of each of us. Some parts in you are called forward, and others recede. The first day and first night is an invitation from the group spirit: do you want to merge some of your parts with some of ours? There's fear because you have to be discerning: who here is trustworthy? It's an unpleasant but necessary process.

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It's Wednesday. My Jesscamp experience has been near perfection so far. Conversations, silliness, play, connection.

But first, some niggles. What's on my mind is the people who have not yet found their way to settle into finding connection with others. As the bonding begins, its like a centre of gravity forms and its easy to imagine there's only one way to be cool here. If you don't align with that, it's easy to exclude yourself and say "oh no this group is not for me". The contrast between some people finding new friendship, and others potentially feeling left out, is distracting me. It's painful. Well, when I'm the one left out, it aches. I see people on the edge of the group and I fear what experience they may be having. I don't need to take responsibility for it, I'm just a homie not a host. But still, I feel a kind of mission, how do we collectively create spaces that have plenty of ways to find meaningful connection?

I had a thought last night, talk with the people who are feeling most juiced up and connected, invite them into a subterranean mission, a pronoiac conspiracy. Your mission should you choose to accept it: find someone who has been on the edge and help them to take a step into the centre.

People who grew up lonely and later became popular sometimes lack a particular social grace. They're so used to playing the outsider role, like the dog catching the car, they don't know what to do once they attain ingroup status.

Specifically there's a move, I hope would come naturally, but many people apparently miss. Once you've completed your arrival, once you feel settled and accepted in the group, once you feel that vigilance switch turn off, then it's your turn to share that experience with someone else.

If you're so primed for being an outsider all the time, once you finally get "in", you might have a fearful shadow lurking, "what if I lose this!?" you don't want to spend even a minute away from the group for fear of losing your insider position. It's easier to stay with the cool kids, the other relaxed ones, and not expose yourself to the anxiety and unsettled energies of the others.

But you can trust that once your belonging button has been pushed, it stays in, you can go and share it with someone else. You just need to remember the embodied sensation of relaxed & engaged, and go do that in their vicinity. Go ask questions, find opportunities to weave them in. And once they're in, now we have another ally who can help recruit the next cohort.

Maybe it would be helpful to have a map.

The hosting team arrives first. Not just physically present in the venue, but arriving into the peaceful relaxed embodied sense of safety, curiosity, readiness to play. The next cohort to find peace will likely be the people who have the most pre-existing context, people who have visited this space, or who have spent more time together in previous events. When that first cohort of guests settles in, now we have a choice, will this be a monoculture, where the way to connect is to make yourself as similar as possible to the people in the core kernel? OR we can nucleate polycentric pluralistic belonging. That is, the group can hold many clusters, little knots of shared values, memes, relationships, common interest. We may get the group to settle into a kind of social foam, multitudes of bubbles, some with 2 or 3 people, others much larger, merging and dividing, frothy, light, a pocket of safety and trust for everyone. But to get to the foam stage I think you need people in the first kernel to understand their role. They need to remember the terror and pain that can accompany the outsider role, approach gently, and enrol strangers into friendship at a responsive pace.

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[redacted] said something and I asked him, hey can I give your psychology a little pinch? I want you to look at those parts of you that you consider to be inadequate like, "if only I had more courage, or if I was less anxious, or more intuitive, then I would find my way into community, then I would feel satisfied and alive." The move l'm proposing here is to take that inadequacy out of yourself and into your environment. You don't lack courage because you're an inferior being, but because your habitat is insufficiently encouraging. Your social diet lacks certain key nutrients. It's not your "fault" that you experience these lacks, they won't be repaired with solitary force of will, for the most part. Development happens spontaneously in the right social context.

One of the unifying experiences of people in this twitter subculture is that they've grown up in impoverished habitat, their environment was depleted of crucial ingredients.

So it's not your fault, there's no inadequacy or inferiority in you, but if you want to change this it is your responsibility. Its up to you to migrate towards more life-giving habitats.

[redacted] said last night this maybe the first time he has truly experienced the feeling of belonging, and he's scared that its fragile and rare. I said that the intensity of feeling in this gathering is rare, sure, it's a temporary peak. The intensity is there to sear into your flesh the felt sense of being in your proper habitat. With that reminder impressed into your tissues, you can navigate your choices after leaving camp. You can compare any moment to this one and observe what ingredients are missing: touch, movement, slower conversation, space, hospitality, permission...

And I gave him my patented prescription for integrating your insights and avoiding the worst impacts of Jess Camp Comedown: while you're here, charged up with enthusiasm, find 1 or more people that you want to stay in contact with, and put a date in your calendar. Seeing them again in a week or two will remind you of this peaceful feeling, you'll be encouraged by the shared feeling and good memories. For extra credit, make it a recurring date. Twice a month for the next three months, lets get on a call and talk. How can we support each other to make the consequential choices that will close the gap between "summer camp" and "real life"?

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I'm reminded of Hanzi Freinacht's idea that there are people in this subculture who are not "normal", people of extraordinary sensitivity and depth of psychological experience, who live outside of the nurturing social context they most need, and are therefore fragile, erratic, overwhelmed, unstable. They need a place to settle, to be taken care of, like in the old times it woulda been a monastery, and there they'll be capable of creating extraordinary works of beauty, truth, wisdom. Its probably always been like this, culture advances by way of the freaks and outcasts, a heavy burden for them to carry, but impossible to disown. I think Jess is collecting these people. They need solace and patronage and companionship.

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I was sitting next to [redacted]. She gave me some tough feedback. I told her thank you, I'm always open to feedback from people when it comes with care & respect. Later she said "in the past I would have been so terrified to say something like that!" And instead of brushing it off like "oh it's nothing" I asked her to say more. When was this terror? Why? What did you fear? Pretty soon she was crying; I said bring it, it's welcome, this is a good place to feel that feeling, let's sit with it.

I can't be sure but this is what I think was happening for her. It's happened to me before so maybe it's a pattern: you're in a beautiful setting, with kind, curious, fascinating people. You feel so accepted, safe and trusting. Some parts of you relax, parts that have been holding a subtle tension of vigilance for many years, decades maybe. You look around and notice that yes, this is it, this is what was missing, that deeply peaceful feeling of belonging. I'm safe here, I'm cared for, I'm welcome. The joy of this moment is intensified by the contrast with all those million moments when you were not fully connected, but lonely, isolated, defended, left out, unloved, unlovely. It's like the joy of the moment inflates extra space in your chest, you're charged up with this energy and warmth, and from that charged-up place, you access the pain and sorrow of all those disappointing moments in the past where you were starving for this kind of connection, and the joy is transmuted into compassion, compassion for those parts of you who felt so sore and so sad that you pushed them out of sight, boxed them up out of view, pretended to yourself and everyone else that they never existed. You became so skilled at hiding it that sometimes you even believed the lie. But now in this connected moment it's like, you finally have the resources available to be able to meet those memories without being overwhelmed, you can see that younger part of you and feel great compassion for them, and you can feel the relief and pleasure of the present moment. This joy-to-compassion alchemy is extraordinarily healing. I believe it's one of the methods we have to come out of small-minded, grasping, competitive, individualistic, survival mindset. After it happens a couple of times, its like paying off a debt. The sense of liberation is permanent. You are rewarded with lightness, more availability for others, like a heavy backpack is taken off your shoulders and suddenly you can dance, turn cartwheels, do whatever you feel. And you have so much more capacity, you can lend a hand to others, you can be a generous friend to more and more people. This is my version of the golden age domino meme: liberated from the sorrow of my unmet needs, I am available to go pay off other people's debts. It's a jubilee. Freedom for me, freedom for others. It cascades, snowballing, accumulating size and momentum. That's the game I came here to play. And I’ve found some people I want to play with.

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