I'm hoping this time will be different, because I have Done Some Work on why I want to write it and what's getting in the way. I think I'll start there.
Snakes and Ladders is one of the framings I've used over the last few years to think about my life in Ecoville. If I reach square 100, I clean the Common House floor. This is something we are all supposed to do a couple of times a year - there's a rota and everything.
I have never cleaned the Common House floor. I have also never paid anyone to clean the Common House floor for me, which is one way to avoid cleaning the Common House floor. It's not that I wouldn't clean the Common House floor, I can see that it needs to be cleaned, I am capable of cleaning it. It's not even a job I would find that unpleasant, in and of itself.
But I never get to square 100, so I can't. I've come close a few times, but then I've hit a snake.
The dice in this game of snakes and ladders is just life -- things that come along in the course of a day or a week or a month. Things you have to deal with. We're all rolling the dice, all the time. Am I going to go for a walk? Should I catch up on my emails? Is it time to do the laundry? In an intentional community, even the most basic level of "just life" involves other people, that's kind of the idea. We have meetings and make decisions and run into each other by the mailboxes and share cars (some of us) and meals (some of us) and hang out in various permutations and combinations. You can totally be an introvert here, but you can't be an isolationist.
Sometimes, there are ladders. Someone is kind in a way you didn't expect, something works out in a way that is deeply pleasing for all involved, serendipity delivers an outcome that is fully greater than the sum of its parts. We put some of the conditions in place to encourage and enable these things, and we work to maintain them, but they are no less delightful as a result. Wow, I say, when I zoom up a ladder, look what we did! Aren't we lucky to live here! Isn't it worth all of the...
...Snakes. Oh, the snakes. The snakes, for me, are mostly the things I didn't see coming. The feedback. The accusations. The behaviours that make it entirely, devastatingly clear that person x doesn't trust you and quite possibly never did, but never said. The cloaking of dogma in appreciative inquiry. The unspoken, unwritten red lines that you don't know about till you cross them. The use of "us" and "we" in a way that doesn't have you in it.
I struggle with the snakes because I don't understand them. And that's why I want to write this, because I want to understand them, and writing is one of the ways I do that. I don't think we all have to like each other. I'd kind of worry if we did. And I know that I personally can be a bit Marmite -- I struggle with small talk, I don't really do 'nice', I swear freely, I give direct answers to direct questions. I like to make myself laugh, I like to make other people laugh. I'm not always as kind as I could be. But I'm not devious. I'd be a terrible politician.
I think that might be at the heart of it. I certainly think it's worth exploring. In terms of what's been stopping me, it's partly writing discipline and partly fear of feedback. (#notallfeedback - I also know a lot of people have found things that I write helpful).
On the former, I've just reduced my working hours to give me a bit more time for mental and physical exercise each week. On the latter, I have been seeing a therapist for a while to help me process my autism diagnosis. And we talk about feedback a lot. I don't have to take it on board if I don't think it's valid. And I have taken a lot on board: I like to write for an audience, but it needs to be a willing one. Some folk just ain't going to like what I have to say, and I shouldn't push it at them. It's a lot harder to get here than it used to be, and I did that on purpose.
So let's fucking go. That floor's not going to clean itself.
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