Insecurities /
Love in Isolation: Love for Your Community /
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.
Love in Isolation: Love for Partner /
By: Aditi Debnath
A: How do you personally know when you’re in love?
N: Oh, that’s a...
A: You can take a minute, no worries.
N: Um… I find it really hard to trust people, and sometimes when I click with someone there’s just this level of trust that I feel. I just know that this is a strong relationship whether it be friendship or a love relationship.
Love is a constantly evolving concept. Turning to the dictionary for answers, love is first defined as “a feeling of warm, personal attachment or deep affection.” However, this seems too simple a definition. I could argue that I feel a warm, personal attachment towards my ovarian cyst that got me out of two months-worth of classes, but I would not say that I loved it. To further explore the cultural definition of love, I consulted a much more reliable source: The Urban Dictionary.
There, the first definition states plainly, “Love is something you give to someone.” Unfortunately, most of the definitions were about as vague as this one, but they all contained similar themes. Along with countless references to “passion” and “selflessness” and “butterflies,” each definition agreed that love is something one can’t help but feel; it is involuntary, powerful, and—at risk of sounding cliché—blind.
A: How long had you been with your partner before quarantine?
N: We had been dating since November - about six months.
This is Natasha. As reputable a source as the Urban Dictionary is, I sought out someone with first-hand experience with love to help me define it. Love manifests itself in relationships in countless ways; how it does so in a controlled environment such as quarantine, however, is what I wanted to know in particular.
A: How often did you see your partner during quarantine?
N: We were already long distance, but with quarantine... you couldn’t visit them anymore which definitely made it hard. We used to see each other, like, at least once a month, and then with quarantine it became two months, three months, because, you know, everything was shut down, and we were all inside trying not to get sick.
No stranger to single-life, I—like many others during quarantine—isolated myself at home, envious of those who had a partner to share lockdown with. I hadn’t considered that, for a long-distance relationship like Natasha’s, quarantine actually puts even more distance between a couple.
A: In what ways did you see the relationship change after the stay-at-home order hit?
N: I think the biggest thing is it really just became less intimate. We definitely got farther apart because… Well I feel like we ran out of things to talk about. It was hard, and I think it’s a large part of why the relationship fell apart because we just couldn’t see each other. I don’t hold it against him or me; I think there’s just a loss of intimacy when you can only see each other through a screen.
Natasha’s relationship ended shortly after quarantine, but there seems to be a more significant reason behind why isolation is so strenuous on relationships. Certainly there had to be a force stronger than the love between Natasha and her partner to cause them to break up.
This drove me to C.S. Lewis’s 1960 book The Four Loves. It’s Lewis’s exploration of the nature of love, specifically using the four terms Greek philosophers use to differentiate between types of love: Storge, Philia, Eros, and Agape. After warning against the modern tendency for people to submit completely to Eros, the term for romantic or intimate love, Lewis states that "Eros in all his splendour ... may urge to evil as well as good" (Lewis 124). He then claims that Eros is a neutral force and explains how this indifferent nature qualifies it as a “natural love.” The natural loves include Eros, Storge, and Philia, and must be subordinate to the fourth and greatest of all the loves: Agape.
Though Lewis specifically defines Agape in terms of Christianity and the love of God, it really just refers to the love that exists regardless of changing circumstances. It is the unconditional or fundamental love that one might feel towards a religion or even to themself. This force is said to be stronger than the force of Eros, which made me more curious about Natasha’s experience in isolation. This time, I wanted to ask her about a different type of love.
A: Quarantine affected a lot of people mentally what with being so isolated and having so much ample time. Did you experience this or how did that affect your relationship?
N: I definitely had a lot of time to self-reflect, and I’m a big person in believing that we can always improve ourselves, so I’m always trying to work on personal growth. I’ve always been a very passive person; I’ve struggled a lot with that. Especially with spending so much time reflecting on myself it kind of made me think about how I need to take control of my life, and not let people walk all over me.
Natasha nurtured herself, just as Lewis described, until her Eros was forced to submit to her Agape. She used isolation to foster the love she felt for herself, and in doing so, realized that her relationship was not doing the same. Practicing self-love is especially difficult, but especially important, when in a global pandemic. Limited access to hobbies or friends or role-models implies a direct effect on one’s self image.
So maybe my quest to define love was a little bit in vain. There are already six different definitions of love in this blog post alone, and each one is entirely accurate as love is inherently boundless. While the love one feels for their partner is strong and compelling, it occurs passively. The love one feels for themself requires practice and intent.
N: [cont.] I think that it was something that was very new to me and is still really hard for me to do, but you spend all that time alone you start to realize, you know, how much time do we really have until the next pandemic?
References
Lewis, C. S. (2017). The Four Loves. San Francisco: HarperOne.
Love in Isolation: Love for Self /
By: Gabrielle Janovsky
Sometimes, you need to learn to love yourself entirely before you can ever share your love with someone else. Gabrielle Ledesma, a makeup artist for ALT magazine, spent isolation with her partner. During a pandemic, intimacy becomes entirely redefined when stuck in a room with your partner, the days passing, experiencing monotony. Your space is no longer just yours. We are required to become conscious about the company we keep. Being so close and proximate to her partner, Gabrielle realized that she needed her own space to grow; otherwise, she would end up “meshing” into her partner.
To save herself, Gabrielle had to love herself enough to advocate for her dreams, taking up the physical space and time needed to pursue them. In a society as cruel as ours, you are your advocate. Unfortunately, even those closest to us will not always provide us with the pushes we need to self-actualize our dreams. You have to love yourself enough to push. Self-love becomes the root of every healthy relationship, with friends, partners, yourself & even your goals. Loving yourself means taking care of your own needs, recognizing that your needs are specific to you, and only you can fulfill them. Self-love is keeping around the people who understand that and push you towards your most whole self and telling those who love you how to best support you in your journeys.
At the beginning of a pandemic, it is easy to become dejected and forget about the things you have always wanted to try and do if you only had more time. Being creative seems less enticing when you are surviving a pandemic when the entire world stops. Gabrielle’s world stopped amidst an intimate relationship, her time escaping just as pre-covid times do.
Gabrielle is a passionate sewer and would often leave her belongings at her home while visiting her partner at his place. Gabrielle found herself “spending so much time with [my partner] I didn’t have time to spend by myself… losing my passions.” In the past, sexual intimacy brought her lots of healing. For Gabrielle, sex “reinforces that I am actually loved, but I do not think that is necessarily healthy.” When you share a space with your partner, physical intimacy cannot heal the way it does heal when you have physical space. Intimacy is not in short. While in isolation, intimacy with oneself can be nearly impossible to find, and for many, self-love can only happen while alone. Gabrielle needed to make changes to regain her sense of self. Gabrielle chose to pursue creative endeavors.
What brought Gabrielle a sense of self-love and intimacy with herself, “discovering new ways to be creative” and spending more time enjoying the “small” things. Gabrielle found self-love through creating with her sewing machine, spending time with her roommates & continuing to explore things to do on her own. Gabrielle built herself self-care rituals through movement therapy. Dancing and letting her mind be free and evaluating brought Gabrielle to falling in love with herself. Journaling became part of critical self-reflection, a type of self-reflection that every human being needs. Especially when it is so painful to sit and be honest with your feelings, only through these intimate moments alone can we begin to fall in love with ourselves. When you are alone dancing in your room or with your sewing machine, it is just you and your art. You get to build a relationship with the things that your hand and brain create. You begin to fall in love with yourself.
After speaking to Gabrielle about her relationship, I realized that the only healing could occur between two whole partners. To be an entire partner, you have to be in love with yourself. A person cannot share the love if they have none to give, and loving yourself can exist as a reminder that you are worthy of being loved. Loving yourself without apologies permits others to love you in that way, too. When you begin to love yourself enough to advocate for the things you know that are right for you, you can be surprised at all the beautiful things your hands and mind can create. When you begin to live for yourself entirely, it is also amazing to see who shows up to see you shine. After interviewing Gabrielle, I am confident that she will continue to shine, too.