Your Community Can Destroy You

“After Hatuey, a fifteenth-century Indian insurrectionist, had been fixed to the stake, his Spanish captors extended him the choice of converting to Christianity and ascending to Heaven or going unrepentantly to Hell. Gathering that his executioners expected to go to heaven, Hatuey chose the other.”

Now replace the word “Heaven” with whatever community has shunned or harmed you — your town, your scene, your friend group, or any circle you once belonged to.

The quote above is the preface to Kathy Acker’s book, My Mother: Demonology. She’s describing the last moments of Chief Hatuey, who was given one final chance to one day join his torturers in heaven, or else spend eternity in hell.

When I first read that passage a few years ago, it arrived at exactly the right time. It helped me realize that — even though none of them might be very good — there are options. Specifically, that you don’t need to beg for forgiveness or fight to remain in a toxic community that has shamed you. You could just walk away.

Community is something we usually think of as unequivocally good: it supports you, it gives and you give back to it, it offers kinship and trust. I used to think of community exclusively in these terms, but now I also see it as something that can destroy your life. It can be disingenuous, intolerant, cruel and vulnerable to collective madness.

The strange thing is, no matter the beating you might take from your community, it’s hard to leave it.

I’ve seen it so many times — someone being hassled or ruthlessly ganged up on by people around them, at work, in a local art scene, or in a small town. And despite the abuse, there is some desperate and usually hard to watch attempt at maintaining a place in that community.

The people in your circles know you, they reinforce your identity. There is a part of you in your community, where you are usually surrounded by like-minded people. So letting it go — no matter how terrible it is to you — feels like losing part of yourself. People will take their own lives at the idea of being ousted from their community, unable to imagine that there is anything beyond it.

This is especially the case in smaller, more niche communities, like a local music scene, or an underground art community, where the network of people is limited. That community can seem like the only one possible. But there will always be other communities, and there is more to life than the life you had. Even if it means moving somewhere new or refocusing your work, it’s far better to start fresh than to humiliate yourself by staying where you’ve been humiliated.

As hard as it is to even consider, the best thing to do when your community turns on you is just to peace out immediately. There’s no guarantee that you will ever be accepted back into that community no matter what you do anyway.

You owe nothing to a community that harms you. A community that mobs you, abandons you, or simply doesn’t provide care in a critical situation, is no longer your community.