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My earliest memory of a real community is 249 Unit, a video editing group I joined in 2018, when I was around fifteen. I don’t remember how I found it. I only remember the texture of being inside it: the average age was seventeen, a few outliers in their early twenties, and the whole thing had the specific energy that comes when people are young and making things together before anyone is doing it for money.
You were taught, somewhere along the way, that needing people was a liability. maybe no one said it out loud. maybe life just kept rewarding you every time you didn’t need anyone, every time you endured alone what others fell apart over, every time you moved on from something that should have broken you and didn’t. the lesson compounded, without you knowing: detachment works. self sufficiency works. you are the proof.
I have had this realization, knowing I almost ruined all my relationships. my childhood, teenage years and early twenties are all lessons of detachment and isolation, and I kind of never been hungry for relationships although I wasn’t so fully into them either, and that paradox was what confused me. that all this independence should lead to some desire of feeling what it’s like to feel the dependence you would feel in all sorts of relationships, all this alone time means I might need at least one loyal friend who I would need to talk to about everything. and it really isn’t that strange, but this was another form of walking contradiction. it confused me, but not that much. attributing factors worked as explanations, I might be fulfilled with the close circle I have, and indeed I have a very small circle where I’m fulfilled with life, satisfied mentally, intellectually and emotionally. my very few friends and family are all I need so I don’t look outside. but then also I shouldn’t cheapen bonding myself with others this much, and I wasn’t, I was genuinely fine in forming healthy relationships with others, but it was so messy. not the kind of messy that comes from a dynamic relationship, but in the mechanism I had of making new ones and then when I realized all the things that were holding me back from maintaining and establishing new relationships in my life, it was because of being emotionally detached.
There are things I carry that I never stop to examine. Experiences I walked through on autopilot, with enough presence to function but not enough to remember . GDSC was one of them. It has been almost two years since I left, and this is the first time I am actually stopping. maybe subconsciously I was avoiding it, maybe the experience was painful in a way that needed distance. or at least that what I thought back then, but mostly it is because I have a self pattern of moving forward and forgetting to look back, and this is me deliberately breaking it, for once.
This is a piece I have always wanted to write. not when I was inside it, not when the feeling was too loud and too close, when emotions clouded reasoning, but now, when enough distance has settled that I can finally lay it down without it burning my hands.
Looking back at my experiences, I can now see that my pattern was never about avoiding responsibility itself. That was the story I told myself for years. The deeper concern was something else entirely. It was about avoiding the spotlight.