sonia | Happy Pride Month, day 6, small groups

6. I am proud of creating community and collaboration at work, at folk dancing, in singing groups. I build connections one person at a time, one conversation at a time, slowly building trust. In the long run, it makes a big difference.

In addition to my minor super power of remembering dances people like, I seem to have a minor superpower for building and running small groups for dancing and singing. Small groups, and minor superpower, because it's very binary. If someone also has collaborative skills, everything is great. If someone doesn't, I don't get along with them well at all.

I think of it like dancing. (Dancing is one of my baseline analogies for everything. Driving my long-ago stick-shift car was like dancing.) Dancing with someone is delightful if there's good non-verbal communication, leading/following/attending to each other to move together in a fun way. If someone isn't paying that specific kind of attention, if they're doing their own thing regardless of what their partner is doing, or trying to force their partner to move a certain way, they're about as much fun to dance with as a log.

So I'm proud of my listening and connecting skills, and at the same time weary to the bone of ending up in power struggles with people, and always wondering if I'm doing it wrong and it's my fault somehow. I have the sense that people get mad at me for refusing to be manipulated, which isn't my problem exactly, and I'm also trying to learn to soften around the recurring problems and just continue on my way as if people were behaving better. Like, pretending it's fine that I'm dancing with a log? Being a good enough dancer to make it look good before putting the log down with relief.