The Importance of Community in a Non-Vegan World (Lessons from a Young Motorcycle Rider)

I want you to listen to the full story here because there's so much more to it and I can't even do it justice, but suffice it to say, there's a huge difference between heading into a scary situation alone, and having a full on troop that have your back. The difference was not having the bullies see that a whole motorcycle squad could come after them if need be, the difference came right down to the fact that this boy no longer felt alone. He had support.

This boy had discovered the one thing that helped him deal with that horrible and violent situation at school. He needed a posse. He needed community.

I've been so blessed throughout my life to find my little tribes of people. People who really get me, accept me exactly as I am, and who stick by me, giving me everything from perspective on things, to a frame of reference, to people to talk to, complain to, people to help me, people for me to stand by and protect (a big one for me, and you'll see why a bit later), to the simplest act of just being there to be my friend and show me kindness and support.

Coming from an ex-bullied, very shy introvert, you know that when I tell you community has meant everything in my life, I mean business. I completely related with this kid feeling invincible when he had a swarm of cool motorbikes and their riders in tow. 

Yes, the boy from the story and I share the past of being victims of bullying, and although this was horribly painful for me, as a child, having everything different from everyone around me was even worse (it was also the reason for the bullying, but that's a story for another day).

I was born into a very atypical family, at least where I grew up in. No dad in the picture, single mom with a physical disability, being the sole only child I knew, having a very small family that mostly lived in another part of the world. I was bad at sports, was in and out of hospitals with my mom, was an extremely shy and introverted kid, I was very short, kind of nerdy, had glasses since the age of 4 and had very different values and belief systems from everyone else around me (partly because I come from a family of artistic hippy rebels). In spite of having a family that was completely made up of non-traditional super cool people, all I wanted was to be like everyone else. I wanted to be normal.

All of my life circumstances made it hard to feel a part of the world I grew up in, but not for long.

I credit my mom for so many of the wonderful things that have happened in my life, but right there, almost at the top of the list, is the community she built for me, and how in spite of it just being her and me, it felt like I had all the support and friends in the world. She taught me very early on that your friends really do become your family.

She built this little community around us in the place where we went to the beach in the summer, where all these friends spent their holidays as well, and I remember this place as creating the happiest moments of my entire childhood, away from hospital visits, the fear of losing my mom, even my shy nature. Here I was able to be myself, I rode my bike for hours on end, climbed every tree I could put that first foot into, we made bonfires with all the friends that had now become family, we got together at the beach, for dinner, for breakfast, to watch the puppet theater productions I would do as a kid, and to eat the tart cherry jam empanadas I would make and sell to them as they watched the show. It was truly, my first sense of community, and I still cherish these people so much and have them in my life in spite of them living thousands of miles away.

After my mom died, and especially in the last few years of her illness, I had met Carlos who had introduced me to his tribe of friends, I also made my own after leaving high school (not quite finding it there, but certainly finding it elsewhere), these people were my lifeline during the most difficult times of my life. They probably don't know just how much of a support they were, since on the outside I was going about life as usual, smiling and making plans, but the inner grieving was long, painful and required so many of those little acts of kindness from them. When someone knocked on my door unexpectedly to see if we wanted to grab some food together, when Carlos and his friends just hung out in my house playing video games or having some beers and talking. When people would rush over to try some of the new foods I was making. It was these small moments, these simple acts of companionship that made this extremely shy introverted grieving "kid" feel like the rug wasn't being pulled out from under her.

These people also let me take care of them, feed them whenever they walked through the door, help them whenever they needed me. A very weird part of grieving a parent who has struggled with a long illness, is the very strange fact that you feel naked without having someone to help and look after. I missed having someone who needed me, and my friends helped me release this feeling by just being there, on the receiving end, and also helped me learn how to ask for and accept help for the first time.

Then I had to leave all these amazing people behind and move to Spain (thank God for Skype!), and in Spain I found another version of my motorcycle club (sans the bikes). It happened naturally and slowly, and when I invite them over, usually for food of course, we actually call it our family dinner! As if I hadn't gotten lucky enough with all these little communities and people I was a part of already, I found another tribe to feel so much a part of, I feel I've known them forever, and even harder than that, I feel they know me and accept me exactly for who I am.

Being a part of these communities of friends was the only thing that cured the desperate desire I had as a kid to fit in and be "normal". As is usually the case with these types of things, feeling good when you have an unusual and different life doesn't come from fitting into the existing mold, it comes from finding people who you can be yourself with, who have shown you love in spite of being different, and even because of it.

I can tell you that when I truly surrendered to my "not typical" status, life became so much better. Although there have been many things that have contributed to this, one of the main things that helped me gain confidence and be able to surrender to the fact that I was always going to be different, was going vegan. It was what I now see as that moment your parents throw you in the deep end of the pool so you lose your fear and start swimming. That's what going vegan felt like for me. It was the last little drop of water in an already filled to the brim glass of "different". Time to pay the piper and accept it.

I've told you many times before that the biggest gift veganism ever gave me was confidence, and for an extremely shy introvert, that is like saying you won the Tour de France of self development. There's nothing more awesome or more helpful in this life than accepting and loving yourself for who you really are, getting to know yourself well, and having the confidence to live your life exactly as you want to, head held high, even if that looks very different from everyone around you. That's what veganism gave me, every time I had to explain to a bunch of glaring eyes at a dinner party why I wasn't eating the shrimp. Every time I had to answer tough questions, every time someone made a joke about carrots screaming in pain as they passed through a grater, and every time people would look at me with that very familiar stare I knew very well from my childhood. That stare that tries to say "oh that's nice dear..." but that actually looks more like "what planet did this one come from?". 

Here's the thing though, being different, or making a different choice, whether that's being vegan, living with a disability, living with mental illness or physical illness, living in a larger body, or in a smaller body, being gay, trans, a man or woman of color, none of this has to come in a vacuum of gladiator power. You don't need to stand alone covered in armour trying to stand tall in spite of how heavy it is. If there's one lesson I've learned through a life of not being ordinary, it's that everyone needs a clan. When I was younger I thought this would only happen when I found a group of equally misunderstood kids, people who shared the same traits as me and the same life circumstances, but really, this never actually happened. What actually happened was that I found people who were very different from me, but that were full of kindness, and that accepted others as they were, and truly understood that that was as normal as their own choices.