Be The Inconvenience

The price of community is inconvenience. Sometimes, you must allow yourself to be an inconvenience to others.

My brother took a six-hour flight to cook a meal for me. The decision to travel across the continent may have been in part due to my recent breakup, but I choose to think he came all the way to Montreal to cook me spaghetti. In return, I taught him how to use a can opener. We cooked in my small kitchen, elbow to elbow, talking about our Oscars predictions and making jokes about Timothee Chalamet’s karmic loss. 

His presence in my kitchen inevitably reminded me of the day after my breakup. My friends invaded my home without asking any questions, carrying bags full of kitchen utensils and ingredients from their own homes. They sat me down on my couch with strict orders to not move, to not clean, to not worry over any mess. They cooked for me, we ate together, and they so graciously ignored the cobwebs on my kitchen’s ceiling and the tears that kept trailing down my cheeks. All my mess, so visible, and right next it were my friends, taking all the empty space I had to give. 

I am not someone who enjoys having people visit my home. I call it privacy and boundaries but in reality it is a fear of being seen. My home is messy, unorganized, full of stuff I have no more use for. I do not feel comfortable letting others see the dust underneath my couch or the crumbles next to the table. I fear the idea of others thinking of me as dirty or unclean, unkempt, uncaring. For many years I have chosen to seal these messier parts of me away from others, and to do that I had to keep loved ones away from my home.

There has been a lot of talk online about building community the past few years. The posts that I have seen on my for you page tend to include the phrase “The price of community is inconvenience”, which I usually translated as going out of your way to help your friends, even if it takes away from your own time and energy. If the price of community is to be needed by others, and folding bits of your life in accordance with that, then I was happy to pay the price for the people I love. 

But, in my kitchen with my friends and my brother, I realized there is more to community. It is easy to allow inconveniences in life when you are the one providing help to others, but it is way harder to allow yourself to be the inconvenience. 

When my friends and my brother stood in my kitchen, I wanted nothing more than to push them to the side and finish cooking the meals by myself. I felt fear, shame, anger. I should be able to deal with this by myself, I should be able to cook a single portion of spaghetti without any help. But my loved ones are more stubborn than me, and I had to content myself with apologizing for every little thing I thought was wrong. After I apologized for everything I could think of, I had no choice but to accept their unwavering presence in my life. They already knew everything that was wrong, and they still chose to stay and cook for me. 

It takes bravery to let someone into your kitchen. To allow them to open drawers you have not cleaned since you first moved in, to stand behind them as they open your fridge and realize that you have way too many jars of expired pasta sauce from years ago and not enough protein for your body to function. It is not easy to let others love you and your empty fridge, to let them see you in such a mundane way. 

Before my friends left that night, the three of them secretly pasted post-its on my fridge, little messages to bring me support for the following days. A month later, my brother would see their post-its as a new tradition and would leave his own note before leaving for the airport. On both occasions, I did not see the new post-its until the next morning. Their love fit right in with my mess, my inconvenience. 

I am still terrified of letting people into my home, but I know a lot more people will want to leave their own post-its in my fridge. I do not want to be selfish enough to stop my friends and family from loving me. It takes bravery to let someone into your kitchen, it takes a lot more bravery to let yourself be loved. With the messiness in your life and the expired food inside the fridge, people still want to love. 

The cost of community is allowing yourself to be fully loved. It is easy to forget love is not something to be won, not something to be deserved. Love simply is. Let it happen to you, let it happen through you, let it stand guard over your kitchen as you cook spaghetti with the leftover sauce your friends and family left behind.