When you hold a lot of space and give a lot of energy, sometimes you end up finding that you're surrounded by people who require a lot of space and energy but who aren't capable (for one reason or another) or willing to hold that same space or give that same energy to you.
There is so much to community building that becomes so complicated, and everyone is unhealed in their own ways. Sometimes those ways are compatible with the ways in which you are unhealed: and you find that you are able to hold space for one another, mutually, and that the space you hold doesn't open up into wounds (or it does, but the very act of holding space becomes healing, less self-sacrifice than a pouring into one another). Sometimes, though, those spaces are incompatible, and the opening of space feels like the opening of wounds, and if not at first then after a time, as though something has rubbed you raw right down to the bone after the accumulation of each time you've let it touch you. Sometimes this is just a critical incompatibility, perhaps you aren't the right people to be in community with one another at this time. Sometimes it's the result of someone not being able to recognize the ways in which they demand. Boundary holding is so vital, but often leads to the triggering of maladaptive defenses and sometimes the ending of the relationship you were trying to preserve by setting the boundary in the first place. Some people advocate for boundary setting loudly, but are also the loudest to criticize you and claim you are abandoning or harming them when you do so.
The bringing together of people and the fostering of intersecting relationships requires time and effort and very careful communication and consideration, and is sometimes the rolling of a snowball gently towards the cusp of a hill: from there it flows so holistically and genuinely and easily, and these people find each other and fold each other into their nets and the shared net of the community. Sometimes it is Sisyphus rolling the ball up the hill over and over again until eventually you realize that perhaps one or more of these nodes must exist in satellite to the whole, and will not or does not desire to integrate within it.
Right now I am tired, and feeling as though critical boundaries must be held. A few of the relationships I've spent the past months fostering are crumbling for their own reasons: one because the other person is determined to remain in a power position that I refuse to engage with any further (giving the benefit of the doubt has to stop at some point, but the loss of this relationship impacts more than just me, which is hard) and the other because boundary holding is causing the other person to feel abandoned. After weeks of holding space for this person through a crisis, at the very moment I need that space held this person is pushing away and yet dragging me towards them -- unwilling to hold space but still demanding mine. And I am just tired, and wondering what patterns exist that push me to continue to forge unequal relationships in my own life, or if this is just really how most people are.
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