Community is one of those words we use often without saying much about what it actually asks of us. We talk about finding community, joining community, or losing it, as if it were a place we could simply walk into. In practice, community is less like a destination and more like something we keep choosing and rebuilding over time. It is made of small, repeated acts of showing up, and it tends to look different depending on who is doing the building and why.
This article looks at three connected questions:
What does it mean to exist in community?
How might we build community in a way that resists the patterns colonialism left behind?
Once we are there, how do we actually make friends?
None of these have tidy answers, but each one becomes a little less overwhelming when we slow down and look at it directly.
What It Means to Exist in Community
Many of us were taught that independence is the goal. The idea is that a healthy adult needs less from other people over time, handles things alone, and avoids becoming a burden. It is a quiet message, but a powerful one, and it leaves a lot of people feeling like needing others is a personal failure.
Existing in community asks us to question that story. Humans are interdependent by design. We rely on one another for food, care, safety, knowledge, and meaning, and we always have. Disability justice movements have made this especially clear by naming interdependence not as a weakness but as a basic fact of being alive. Writers in this tradition describe care as something we move between us, not something the strong give to the weak.
Existing in community also means letting go of the idea that belonging has to be earned. Many people arrive in new spaces braced for evaluation, quietly waiting to find out whether they are enough. But belonging is not a prize for performing well. Sometimes existing in community simply means being present, contributing what you can, and allowing yourself to be known a little at a time. You do not have to be impressive. You only have to be there.
Rethinking Community Through a Decolonial Lens
When we talk about building community from a decolonial lens, we are talking about noticing the patterns colonialism and capitalism trained into us, and gently choosing something different.
Colonial systems tend to treat relationships as transactions. They reward ownership, hierarchy, competition, and the idea that there is never quite enough to go around. That scarcity mindset shapes how we relate to each other, often without our realizing it. We can start to treat people as resources, weigh whether a relationship is worth our time, or assume that helping someone leaves less for us.
A decolonial approach invites a different starting point, one drawn largely from Indigenous and other non-Western traditions that center reciprocity and relationship. In her writing on Indigenous knowledge, Robin Wall Kimmerer describes a worldview built around the gift rather than the transaction, where receiving something carries a responsibility to give back and to care for the web of relationships you are part of. From this view, community is not something you extract value from. It is something you tend.
Several practices tend to follow from this shift:
Reciprocity over transaction. Instead of keeping score, we think in terms of flow. Care given freely tends to return, often not from the same person and not on a predictable timeline.
Interdependence over independence. We assume that needing each other is normal and good, rather than something to apologize for.
Abundance over scarcity. We practice trusting that there is enough, and that sharing tends to create more connection rather than less.
Repair over disposal. When conflict happens, and it will, we lean toward accountability and repair rather than cutting people off. Abolitionist and transformative justice organizers have written extensively about building communities where people can make mistakes and still belong.
Mutual aid is one of the clearest living examples of these ideas. Rather than charity, which often flows downward and keeps people in fixed roles, mutual aid is people meeting one another's needs directly, with the understanding that everyone has something to offer and everyone needs support sometimes. These practices are not new. They have deep roots in Black, Indigenous, immigrant, queer, and disabled communities that have long survived by taking care of one another when larger systems would not.
A decolonial lens also asks us to slow down. Colonial culture moves fast and prizes productivity, but relationships do not grow on that timeline. Building community this way means making room for slowness, rest, consent, and the understanding that trust is built over many small moments rather than demanded all at once.
How to Actually Make Friends in Community
Even with all of this in mind, the practical question remains. You are standing in a room full of people, or scrolling past an event you are too nervous to attend, and you are not sure how to turn proximity into friendship. This part is genuinely hard for a lot of people, and it is okay to admit that.
A few things tend to help.
Choose repetition over intensity. Friendships are built far more by showing up to the same low-stakes thing over and over than by one big meaningful conversation. The weekly craft night, the monthly meetup, the same coffee shop on the same morning. Becoming a familiar face is often the real first step. Researchers call this the mere exposure effect, the simple finding that we tend to like people and things more as we encounter them repeatedly.
Let shared activity do some of the work. If direct socializing feels like a lot, especially for neurodivergent folks or anyone who finds small talk draining, side-by-side activity takes the pressure off. Making something together gives your hands a job and your conversation a low, easy bar to clear. This is part of why creative and maker spaces so often become friendship spaces.
Offer before you extract. Communities built on reciprocity respond well to people who contribute. You do not have to do anything grand. Bring snacks, help stack chairs, remember someone's name, follow up on something they mentioned. Small offerings signal that you are invested in the group, not just looking to take from it.
Be the one who follows up. A surprising amount of friendship comes down to the unglamorous act of reaching out again. Most people are waiting to be invited and afraid of being a bother. If you can tolerate the small risk of sending the message, you often become the person who turns acquaintances into friends.
Let yourself be a little known. Connection deepens when we share something real, in small and appropriately sized doses. You do not have to overshare or perform vulnerability. You just have to let people see a true thing about you now and then, and to receive the true things they offer back.
Be patient and gentle with yourself. Real friendship usually takes months, not minutes. Awkwardness is not a sign that you are doing it wrong. It is a normal part of two people slowly learning each other. If a space does not feel right, you are allowed to leave and try another one. Finding your people is often a process of elimination as much as discovery.
Community Is Built Slowly, and That Is Okay
There is no version of this that is fast, smooth, or free of awkward moments. Community is not a thing you find fully formed and step into. It is something people build together, imperfectly, over time, through showing up and trying again. The good news is that this means you do not have to get it right on the first try. You only have to keep choosing it.
From learning to exist in community without earning your place, to building it on reciprocity rather than transaction, to the small brave acts of making a friend, all of it points back to the same truth. We are not meant to do this alone, and the wanting itself is a sign of health, not weakness.
At Femme & Them, we hold this close in our work. So many of the people we support have been taught that needing others is a flaw, or have been pushed out of communities that were never built with them in mind. You deserve spaces where you can exist fully, be met with care, and build the kind of belonging that does not ask you to shrink. Whether you find that in a community space, a therapy room, or both, we are here when you are ready.
Sources
adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (AK Press, 2017)
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed Editions, 2013)
Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) (Verso, 2020)
Mariame Kaba, We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Haymarket Books, 2021)
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018)
bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (William Morrow, 2000)
Sins Invalid, Skin, Tooth, and Bone: The Basis of Movement Is Our People (2019)
Robert B. Zajonc, research on the mere exposure effect (originally published 1968)
