V - The Hierophant

...and Cultivated Community

Feb 12, 2022

Part I - A Little Life

From October to December, I felt quite lonely. I didn’t have any friends here (aside from my roommate, who had a full time job and a boyfriend), and I didn’t know how to go about making friends. I’d also been struggling with many of my existing friendships for some time. I felt misunderstood, out of place, or just generally not myself around almost everyone. For a year or maybe longer, I’d been retreating, reexamining, hermiting.

The day I moved to Portland, I began listening to the audiobook A Little Life, narrated by the gentle voice of Oliver Wyman, whom you may recognize from his roles as Pedestrian in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, or Professor Honeycutt/Fugitoid in the 2003 TV series Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (+ a handful of other audiobooks you might have actually listened to, but these were funnier).

Now, the following timeline of my introduction to and eventual reading of A Little Life is not important at all to the point of this newsletter, but it is cute, and important to me :) This is my *current* favorite book I’ve ever read, so I drew this series of events to celebrate the journey it took on its way to that space in my heart.

Yanagihara illustrates the lives of her characters hyper-realistically, sparing no mundane details. She lets you intrude on this circle of friends in what feels like real time for 200 pages, and then jumps a heartbreaking 10 years, only to pick back up in real time for another 300 pages. Following them through little moments over the course of their lives, it feels like you’ve been there for every little moment, their whole lives. You learn their doctor’s name and what their sweaters smell like and which kinds of exercise they prefer and what their parents’ names are, and you remember all those intimate details months after finishing the book. You come to feel closer to them than many of your real life friends.

For this reason, for me, the profound sadness everyone talked about with this book extended beyond its story. I realized how stagnant and shallow my friendships seemed in comparison to the embarrassing, vulnerable, painful, awkward, intimate, attentive, caring, truly special connections I saw grow between these characters. This book directly altered how I’ve begun to think about and approach my relationships.

*in case you are interested in reading this book, I’m including this list of trigger warnings because it’s a heavy one and if you think you may be sensitive I’d just take a look before starting <3

Part II - My Tarot Reading

On January 2nd, I did a “2022/year ahead” tarot reading, and pulled the 6 of cups to represent my “theme for the year”. (Here’s the whole reading if you’re curious about what these cards look like in action.)

After a few months of wallowing in my loneliness and complaining about how hard it was to meet anyone my age, I interpreted this 6 of cups as a gentle nudge to get back into the world, go on dates, check in on my friends, make any kind of active effort to cultivate a community for myself here in Portland.

The issue is, I’m used to falling into my communities - passively shaping my life around the all-consuming structures of school, a sports team, a job. With these mandatory life-pillars in place, I could safely wade through each day and accept friends, colleagues, mentors, love interests, etc. as they came to me. The superfecta of finishing school, moving to a new city, navigating a pandemic, and freelancing has made me realize I don’t fully know how to seek out these elements of life. I’ve always just let them ~happen~ to me.

While this new responsibility to myself was intimidating, the 6 of cups also reminded me that it could be fun. An experiment of sorts. For the first time, I felt allowed to actually think about the kinds of people I want to surround myself with, and then be the first to extend a hand of greeting.

Part III - Putting My Money Where My Mouth Is

Okay okay, so I had these realizations. So far you’ve seen a lot of talk and not a lot of walk, though, right? Well fear not, 2022’s been good to me and I DO have some early results to report.

If you know me at all you could probably guess that I hate dating apps. If you totaled up the number of days (before this year) that I’ve had an account on any dating app, it probably wouldn’t break two weeks. Twice (maybe thrice?) since the pandemic began, I’ve downloaded one of the apps out of a need for validation or connection, and had a mediocre time swiping and messaging for a few days until deleting it completely because 1. being on dating apps feels deeply embarrassing to me, and 2. I was feeling neither validated nor connected.

However, I decided to give it one more shot after seeing my “year ahead” reading, and downloaded Bumble. I’m not sure if it’s this app versus the others, or a change in attitude, or just luck, but I ended up meeting a few really cool people. So thanks for the nudge, cards!

An aspect of school that I’ve really been missing is having a pool of artists and creative peers to bounce ideas off of, share work with, relate to. Without anyone to give me assignments or hold me accountable, it’s way too easy for me to let my job eclipse my art.

A few weeks ago, I was last minute invited to a call with four other young portland photographers. The purpose of the meeting was to form this exact sort of artistic community that each of us had been missing in our lives. We talked about how we define ourselves as artists, who we look up to, and what we’re working towards. We gave ourselves an assignment. It was incredibly refreshing, and I can’t wait for our second meeting in a few weeks.

Yes, this community did kind of fall into my lap. I didn’t necessarily cultivate it. BUT !! I almost didn’t attend (because of a small list of reasonable excuses, but really I was intimidated). So I’m counting this as a sort of active cultivation, even if all I did was stand my ground and show up.

Volunteering regularly has been probably my most textbook method of cultivating a community for myself. My sister introduced me to Blanchet House the day before Thanksgiving, and I became hooked on the easy atmosphere. It was an ideal, natural environment to meet all kinds of people in. You stand across from other volunteers or residents, ask them their names, chat for an hour while each of you complete your little tasks, and then wave bye and repeat next week.

I expected to meet new people every time, practice my social skills, maybe make a friend or two. Instead, I found myself growing closer and closer to the same people - the ones who are there every morning. They remembered my name after probably two shifts, and surprised, I started making a more deliberate effort to remember theirs. After another few weeks, they started asking me (with genuine excitement) about the various gigs I’d mentioned I had coming up. “How was Burgerville? How’d the hand modeling go?” I was so touched.

We swap our little updates every week, and then some. On my sister’s birthday last month, she tried to facetime me while I was sitting down for breakfast with a few of the staff. I picked up, said I’d call back in a few, and then told the table about my plans to visit her over the weekend. I added that she was the person who brought me here for the first time, and in one of the great highlights of my year so far, their eyes widened with a hilarious realization.

They remembered her, as a bit of an enigma, from when she rode in on a scooter over the summer after crashing at a friend’s place in the city. She had explained to them that she didn’t live in Portland, but she signed up to volunteer at 6 in the morning because she was “looking for something to do” while waiting for me to meet her in the city for a concert. She made a friend or two during the shift and walked around town with them until I found her a few hours later.

It’s so natural for Syd to try new things and talk to people and make friends. She has this ease about her that I can’t help but chuckle at, despite my envy. Oh well, we can’t all be so wonderfully odd and charismatic and curious and memorable. Some of us just need to be consistent.

Finally, as the song goes, “make new friends, but keep the old,” I’ve been making an effort to show up more authentically in my existing relationships. Little by little I’m trying to peel back the defensive walls I’ve built around myself, and sink deeper into these connections that I let myself sit guarded in. Already it’s scary, but also exhilarating and rewarding in a way that makes me want to push for more.

Part IV - The Card

I struggled for a few weeks trying to decide which card to write this letter under. At first I wanted to use the Empress, the complement to the Emperor, but that archetype has more to do with femininity, the senses, fueling creativity with emotions, etc. The Hierophant on the other hand has a more logical connection to this idea of community.

The Hierophant, sometimes referred to as The Pope, traditionally represents social order, dominating public opinions and beliefs, religious structures, knowledge and formal education, social expectations, community and connection through a shared environment or belief system, trusting in cultural tradition or scientific consensus or spiritual leadership. Reversed, it usually indicates unconventionality, or an unconventional path through whatever area of life you’re asking about.

For whatever reason, I’m always annoyed when the Hierophant pops up in a reading, which, go figure, it recently did for me. I think I have a hard time connecting to it emotionally and understanding what it’s trying to tell me. In perfect timing, however, a friend recently gave me their interpretation of this card after we both confessed our negative attitudes toward the figure. The Hierophant signals to them the idea of misplaced belief, perhaps an unhelpful subscription or loyalty to tradition, to the ways you’ve always done things.

Maybe this new, inconvenient space I’ve been thrown into and forced to navigate will result in stronger connections than the naturally social life structures I inhabited and relied upon before. Maybe Cupid’s arrows land truer when he hands you the quiver, and teaches you to aim for yourself.

With love,

Jordan