Yes. Let us build radical communal care collectives! Many of them! And connect them in vibrant, intersectional networks! But when we are obliged to organize our care collectives in the digital format (because of an ongoing pandemic, for instance), they can be treacherous and our interactions can get contaminated by hurtful habits, that we picked up through social media.
On the 8th of December 2023 i published an enthusiastic and much too optimistic post. It was inspired by our small communal care collective. I felt very happy about it and could almost not believe our luck. But already back then, even though i mostly kept this to myself, i remained cautious, always a bit worried and unsure about it, wondering how long it was going to last.
And yes, in hindsight i should have been even more cautious. Much more cautious.
Yet while it had been ongoing this group came as a huge relief for us (here: my partner and i). The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic had driven the two of us into social isolation, our lives had gotten dominated by increasing amounts of loneliness, FOMO and anxiety.
When everyone around us started to normalize the ongoing pandemic (read: played make believe that it was over), we could not afford that luxury. With my (presumed) Long COVID i didn’t want to risk a re-infection, because those often tend to make existing Long COVID cases worse (in 78% of cases). And my partner, thankfully, agreed to stay cautious. But with time this meant that we had gotten left behind by almost everybody else, family, friends, co-workers, society at large.
All the more we cherished it, when we started a remote/online group, which allowed us to be in regular contact with other people, who were stuck in situations with comparable degrees of social isolation, just like we were.
The group had started out as a Signal chat for like-minded, COVID-cautious people, as a place where we could exchange notes, share our experiences and reflect on them on a meta level. But it had soon grown into an important pillar in our lives, that took a huge weight off of our shoulders. We felt seen and heard and understood and supported. And we could see, hear, understand and support others. It felt great.
It also seemed as if we had gotten lucky and, despite the randomness of meeting people on the internet, had found some very interesting ones to form our group with. Varied in age, living in various countries in Europe, we seemed to have struck a nice balance. It seemed to go surprisingly well. Which all explains my enthusiasm in my earlier blog post.
Among the five active members, three of us had Long COVID while two were the primary care persons of two of them. During the written chat and regular video calls we sometimes shared intimate moments and made ourselves quite vulnerable, but at other times the chat stayed on a more superficial level, when we exchanged banter, emojis and laughed together. Our video meetups were held with regular pacing breaks, with PEM in mind, we wanted to be careful not to exhaust anyone too much.
We also created two zines together (well, one and a half, really, but more on that later):
Open Letter to our Comrades
Testimonials of the Collectively Abandoned
But then, just like that, our group fell apart – pretty much exactly one month after the post i mentioned above. We had a conflict, or a disagreement, if you will. And even though it had been the first conflict we experienced, it resulted in three (of the five) people leaving our group.
They left, not without leaving hurtful statements, containing heavy accusations against me, who they seemed to have made out to be the “bad guy” in this story. With them gone we could no longer discuss, clarify or process any of it in the group. That is why their final statements felt like they had been dumped on me, and on us.
One person in particular had said very hurtful things. Another person had written a statement laden with therapy-speak/pop psychology. Only one of the three had left the group with kind words and vibes.
There is no need to go into more details about what exactly was said. That’s private.
In a similar way, there is no need to go into too much detail in regards to what our disagreement had been about. Suffice to say it was mostly a misunderstanding. And that maybe communication was not helped by cultural and language barriers?! Difficult to say. But in the end it was not more and not less than a disagreement. And while we had always assumed that conflicts and disagreements were bound to happen in groups, the others maybe did not see it that way.
The key point of the disagreement, revolved around the topic of intent vs. impact in communication. One person said, since the intent of their communication had been good [sic], the hurtful impact it had on the other person should not matter. While the other person disagreed with this and insisted that hurtful and traumatizing acts can often be done with the best of intentions.
I sincerely hope this brief summary to be fair:
Person A felt misunderstood because the intent of something they said was valued less than the impact it had on person B.
Meanwhile person B felt gaslit, because the impact it had on them had been belittled and the discussion sidetracked to talking about the intent of person B.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
~ Ancient proverb
As far as conflicts go, this one seemed quite solvable. This may well have been one of the cases where both things are true. The intent of the communication had been positive, yet its impact had been negative. To deny or belittle either of these elements made the situation worse.
I did not think of mentioning it at the time, but i believe the second axiom of communication by Watzlawick could have been quite helpful here. It states that every communication has a content aspect and a relationship aspect. Both intent and impact touch both of these aspects. To reduce it to just one may well have been the key issue.
But the discussion about all this was barely allowed to start, when first one, and soon after two more people left our group.
Bamm. Gone.
Without judging anyone, this needs to be called what it is: Because of our very first disagreement three people left our group. A group that had been a place of comfort, intimacy, vulnerability and mutual care for five people for more than five months.
If just one person had left the group, sure, to some extent this may have been understandable, even if a bit drastic and maybe manipulative. This could have been remedied. But when two more left the group, that was the end of our group and we were left speechless, falling into despair.
By leaving they had picked a side, which also meant that they were unaware how picking a side would make the conflict worse. Meanwhile my understanding is this: ultimately there are no sides per se in interpersonal conflicts. Conflicts are a dynamic, where several parties play a role and several factors coming into play. Also, conflicts (or disagreements) are not a tragedy, but instead a natural occurrence in any group.
Beyond that, by leaving so fast these three people seemed to have made it clear, that their model for care and support was a different one than ours had been. In our view conflicts would be an integral part of it, one that needed to be embraced, but would also present us with a potential for growth. Whereas, and i admit to be speculating here, their idea of communal care was based more on unconditional support with an avoidance of all conflicts.
We were devastated. At first not so much because of the conflict itself. What devastated us was the finality of them leaving the group. We could not understand why such a drastic step needed to be taken. And as we should soon find out, there was no way to clarify any of this with these people, who we had considered to be our friends.
As mentioned above the group had grown into a crucial part in our lives and when it fell apart it was brutal. To not fully understand why made things much worse though.
But first we needed to be brave. Because while all this had been going on, we were also in the process of finishing our second zine. In fact we had already started to discuss layout and it was ready to go. So the two of us decided to finish the zine as fast as we could, because we thought we owed it to the other people, who had contributed and trusted us with testimonials. We also understood, the longer we waited, the harder it would get to ever finish it.
Once we published the zine, we both crashed. Hard.
Only then did we notice that none of our former comrades were promoting our zine online, which we found puzzling. After all, we had started this project together with them. What was this about? Not only had they left us to do all the work it had meant to finish it, but now they didn’t even assist us to promote it? Hmm.
Maybe we were naive, but we had hoped that this would be an amicable separation. Sometimes a group constellation simply does not work out. This is too bad and can be very sad. Sometimes groups break apart because of it. But there is no need to then fight against each other after.
Because, big picture here, are we not all still suffering under the same alienation, and even know this about each other after months of intimate exchange on the subject? And are we not still fighting for the same causes, against ableism, eugenics, alienation and social isolation?
Or aren’t we?
It was at this point that i got very depressed. For more than a week i was catatonic (self diagnosed), i think, or how would you call the state i was in: Sitting on the couch, slumped over, rocking back and forth, stiff as a board, staring into the void for hours and days on end? I had known depression before, but never such an extreme form of it.
In my mind i played and re-played the conflict that had provoked the break up, over and over again, in an endless loop. Several times i read and re-read what had been written. I became hyper self-critical, unhappy about my part and my role in it. I was beating myself up, thinking that i had gotten too wordy, too impatient, maybe too principled. Which, as i am aware about myself, is a common pattern i have.
In this situation, it was because i was panicking, which can explain, but not excuse the way i behaved. From the onset i was scared shitless that the group would fall apart. And in my clumsy, maybe too headstrong way, in trying to save it and desperate to explain myself, i probably spurred the break along.
Since then i have spent countless sleepless nights thinking the conflict through. While laying awake i engaged in an imaginary dialogue with our former comrades and friends, trying to explain myself, arguing my case, oops, again falling into my pattern. But at the same time, i was now owning my part in it and asking them for forgiveness.
Meanwhile my Long COVID symptoms had gotten worse, probably because of the stress, the depression, the lack of sleep and the weight of the loneliness crushing me and us again. I can only hope, that the other two LC-sufferers fared better in this regard. But i had no way of knowing. Because they had broken all contact with us.
What i can say for certain, knowing myself, is that i was willing to see this disagreement through. I am not a quitter (no judgement here, just an observation). Conflicts don’t scare me, i even think we should invite conflicts into our groups. Because not only are conflicts bound to occur, they can also be a stress-test as well as an opportunity to learn more about ourselves and others, and as such they should be seen as an opportunity. I would even go as far as saying, too much harmony makes me suspicious. But that’s just me, aye.
That is why i remain convinced that this disagreement could have been solved. If only there had been a willingness among all of us, to take an honest, self-critical look, to own our own part in it. Sadly it seems that people are rarely willing to step outside the victim-perpetrator mindset, they prefer to remain inside a black and white view of the world, with one person is to blame, instead of looking for the social dynamic with its compliacted shades of grey where multiple factors interlock.
But while i and my partner had been taking self-critical inventory, and also still hoping to somehow fix this, these guys were unwilling to forgive.
After some interactions with them on social media had gone unanswered, i started to suspect that something was off. A few days later all our former comrades blocked us on Mastodon, which incidentally was the social network where we had met each other. My partner wrote a carefully worded message to them on Signal. But they never even read it, the two ticks stayed clear. Which meant they had probably muted us there as well. It was now impossible to reach out to them.
This to us felt like a further punch while we were already down on the floor. So unnecessary.
It was very hurtful to get blocked without understanding why and without having the possibility to reach out to them to find out their reasons. A few weeks earlier we had been in intimate and almost daily exchange. We had spent Christmas Eve and New Year’s with them. A few weeks earlier one of them had kept telling us how much they loved us.
And now we were blocked which prevented any further interaction?!
According to the first axiom of communication by Watzlawick, you cannot not communicate, when they blocked us this was a form of communication. But one where we could only guess what it was supposed to mean.
It seemed to convey to us, that we were now somehow the enemy.
All we had left was to cry. But all the tears in the world could not fix any of it.
So what does this have to do with social media, you might wonder. Well, the way a small (but not benign) disagreement was allowed to escalate into an inconsolable conflict, which in our case lead to our radical care collective falling apart, had a very similar vibe to how conflicts tend to have a tendency to escalate online, in particular social media.
These three people, who we believed were our friends (or with whom we at the very least were in the process of becoming friends) and with whom we had very much enjoyed spending time with, had completely turned the page on us to now be actively hostile, against us. Among ourselves we sometimes joked (or tried to joke) that they had swiped left on us.
This felt to us as if they were demonizing us, framing us as the only party responsible for the conflict and whatever happened after. Plus this is exactly the kind of black and white thinking one keeps witnessing online. Which was sad and shocking to us, especially because we have always been more interested to look at situations in shades of grey and with more nuance.
CW: emo venting
The worst outcome for me personally is that i lost my trust in people (or to be fair, i lost even more of it, it had already been in decline). But after this experience i could no longer muster the courage to try and look for new people to form a group with. Impossible to dig myself out from underneath such a heap of accusation and blame, that seemed to come flying my way. If only i understood, though, because mostly this happened in unspoken, in “you cannot not communicate” ways. Now blocked from any interactions with them, there was no way to find out what exactly they accuse me of.
As a result this has filled me with even more self-doubt and -hatred.
What if they are right.
What if i really am the problem.
What if i really am incapable of functioning in a care group.
What if i really am a bad and flawed human being.
What if maybe i really need to be shunned into social isolation.
I know, i know. This is not a rational reading of this situation. No conflict, not one! conflict ever, is the fault of just one of the parties involved. But while i understand this rationally, the way i was/we were treated in this situation had hurt me so much, that i got lost in self-hatred.
The usual.
The despair is so deep now that all i can hope for is to die soon and to relieve everyone of my presence.
//end CW
Non-sequitur alert.
So, what can we learn from this? Maybe … Argh.
Here are a few lessons for building radical communal care collectives, that i personally would draw from this experience (and i am not saying anyone else should draw the same):
– Be careful not to trust people too fast. If your group has not survived a conflict, try to stay on your guards and do not invest too much trust in the group. Do not make yourself too vulnerable.
– Try to cultivate an inviting attitude towards conflicts in your groups. Conflicts are not the end of the world, nor of your group. Or at the very least, they don’t need to be. But sometimes they are as this example shows.
– In care groups some people look for unconditional support, mutual understanding and the patting of each others backs. This is fine, no judgement. Meanwhile others look for a place where conflicts and difficult emotions are possible, allowed to occur, and seen through. Obviously these tow understandings are not compatible. Which is why these different expectations need to be clarified early on in the group. Without judging anyone, ask each other what it is you are looking for in regards to harmony/conflict.
– Radical honesty and some confrontation can still be supportive, if! all agree to this approach. Tough love can be love.
– Be wary of people flattering you. The most brutal things were said to us by the person, who had been constantly saying to us, what great people we were and how much they loved us. People buttering others up tend to be ‘harmoneedy’ (which is a word i invented, a translation of the German harmoniesüchtig, in other words, people who are strongly in need of harmoniousness).
– Cultural and language barriers should never be underestimated.
– Remember the first two axioms of communication by Watzlawick.
1. You cannot not communicate.
2. Every communication has a content and a relationship aspect.
(And i still hope someone might explain to me the other three axioms 
)
P.S. I am not going to assume that they will read this post, in fact i believe it highly unlikely. But should any of our former comrades read this blog post, please allow me to briefly address you directly here. It is my sincere hope that i have been fair in my way of describing the situation and our conflict. It was my aim not to judge, not to name names, not to quote, but instead to only describe what actually did happen. Of course i am aware of biases and subjectivity. But my intent was as stated.
It was, and is, not my intent to blame anyone for what has happened, not at all even. That is simply not the way i think and operate, and i sincerely hope i was able to convey this. I look at it, or at the very least try to, from a much more systemic viewpoint. The reason why i wrote things down here, was because i was trying to understand it, to hopefully learn from it. Plus also as a follow up to and a word of caution after the blog post from December 2023.
But i come in peace, LOL, and i still hope that we can somehow clarify this together, at some point, and that we can act in amicable and maybe even supportive ways towards each other.
