By Gabrielle Janovsky
The community can be aesthetic when you are queer, non-binary & disabled. I can’t just seem to find people like out there, or at least, people that understand me beyond explanations of myself.
By seemingly falling through the cracks of everything that is a community, I began to understand what exactly it means to love one's community. Circumstances have forced me to re-contextualize what community means. In the United States, and many other places that I cannot speak on behalf of, a community is created through identity. The community I have been born into is that of Russian Jewry. My parents immigrated from what was once the USSR to escape religious persecution. When your family comes from a place with weak roots, the need to replant said roots becomes key for survival. We have many seeds in Northeast Philadelphia. Many of our people immigrated there together, and I feel some degree of safety knowing I have a community that technically has my back. My family managed to accumulate and hoard enough wealth to send me to school; the majority of my dreams, granted to me on behalf of their sacrifices.
I grew up in my comfortable, Russian Jewish bubble in Philadelphia, enjoying the fruits of a culture built in Eastern Europe many generations prior. Because, although we are Westerners now, you can never fully dig out someone’s roots. Despite my love for my roots, the issue of community and my Russian Jewry came into instant conflict once fully immersing into American culture. Very early on in my life, I realized that I am queer. I cannot say that my experience is very different from that of many other queer people, but being queer in my Russian Jewish bubble can mean social isolation. Suddenly, a piece of me I eventually became incredibly comfortable and intimate with fell in between the cracks of my community. The people I have known to love me suddenly made me feel unsure. Sunday brunch at my Deda’s home eating doktorskaya kolbasa and onion did not fill me in the same way that it used to.
My grandpa may never know that I am queer, but he is my community because he will always love me. He will always feed me. In Russian Jewry, you learn to love through mutual support, even if this connection lacks some levels of mutual understanding. Loving and owning my Russian Jewish community will always be part of me. In this way, I am safe in the Russian Jewish community’s cracks, and there is this understanding that parts of me belong at home elsewhere, too.
Disability creates a bizarre way for you to fall into the cracks of community, too. It is easy to remember how little you are supported when you find yourself healing from your third mental breakdown this week. Coming to Wisconsin, I was entirely alone. Albeit American, my Russian Jewish, collectivist roots did not prepare me for just how on your own America leaves you. I have never lived so far away from family. No one warned me about the one-month-long wait times to get a session with a psychologist at school. So, I spent most of my lowest moments alone, too afraid to tell people at home about how often I struggled. The Wisconsin community, although there, was not easy to find a community within for me. I always managed to fall through the cracks of our community, sometimes disappearing for months.
Although college’s social aspects did not provide me with the community I ultimately sought, The School of Human Ecology, Community & Non-Profit Leadership & my professors somehow did. Although my disability exists, untreated and unsupported, my program introduced me to a network of individuals, all collectively healing. I felt community again when I met activists from Freedom Inc., fighting for a prison and police-free future to protect the Black community, and thus, our greater community (humanity) from state-sanctioned violence. I felt community again when my professor, Dr. Carolina Sarmiento, led a course that allowed me to research on behalf of Freedom Inc. I felt community when my Teachers’ Assistant, Bakari Wallace, pulled me aside to provide me with supplemental readings on Afro-Pessimism. Bakari was the first person to tell me I should consider pursuing scholar activism, a community of academics I never thought I could be at home with. Academia has an interesting way of welcoming home all of those who can contribute to the larger community that is academia.
The work I was and continue to engage in places me within a much larger, collective community, simply, humanity. A community that asks us to look beyond ourselves and begin to think of our world through systems, forcing us to connect. Through this work, I healed with the community. My program was a part of Wisconsin that taught me community: a shared desire to build something better for the people we love and a willingness to fight for that future. I saw this love and willingness to fight at protests. I saw peers I have known in classrooms, now standing in front of thousands of people with a blowhorn, reminding us we have lives beyond our own to fight for. In Madison, this sort of love can be found sprinkled throughout the many organizations that run on behalf of serving the community. From Freedom Inc., Domestic Abuse Intervention Services to organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union (UW Chapter) and the Young Democratic Socialists of America. There is a community in the collective struggle against oppression.
My ultimate point is that when you are queer, non-binary & disabled, a community is everywhere and nowhere. I find pieces of me in everyone, but ultimately, no one. I am thankful that I can squeeze in between so many different spaces, though. I feel like there is so much to learn from each person I meet. But, we are pack animals who all need safety in groups by being human. I just learned to find my safety and community pockets in the in-betweens. One day I hope to see the community that best fits me, one that feels like mine and my home genuinely, but I am not sure that is even out there for me. And so, with that, and to cope, I leave you with a list of thank-yous for the many communities that have housed me while I try to grow into my own and continue to melt into these spaces.
I thank
The Internet, for introducing me to a vast diversity of experiences. There is no one right way to live.
The greater LGBTQA+ community for giving me the words to understand who I am, and one day, I hope to be amongst you and see if this is where I fit.
To the Russian Jewish community for raising me to be resilient, hard-working & resilient.
To every single author, poet, or singer whose words reminded me of the collective I belonged to, even when my pain felt like mine alone.
To the disabled community to provide me with the confidence, resources, & knowledge I needed to understand and love my disabled brain truly.
It is terrifying to enter a world alone, but with the little pieces I leave everywhere, I find community and build safety for myself and those around me.