Happy New Year, readers!

Happy New Year, Sam!

Thank you! I’m calling it now, folx. In 2026 the #1 priority needs to be building community. Whether you join a mutual aid society, a club, or a movement, we absolutely must gather together and use our strength as one if we expect to survive this thing.

I’m not speaking hypothetically, and you don’t need me to outline the dire circumstances we find ourselves in. You didn’t come here for that, and you’re smart anyway.

Building community, for me, will be challenging. You know your boi loves staying home. I did take a part-time job as a harm reduction coordinator for a local substance abuse recovery organization, which is cool and difficulty. And there is one more community I came in close contact with in 2025: the one inside me.

Ooo ah what a profound metaphor, Sam.

Well, actually, dear reader, I got this metaphor from Star Trek, so it is profound, by default. In “The Chase” (S6E20), Captain Picard explains that:

“The Kurl believed every individual is a community of individuals. Inside us are many voices, each with its own desires, its own style, its own way of viewing the world.”

In my instance, this metaphor is literal. It is hard to nail down who I thought I was before my diagnosis, before I knew I was disabled. Once I’d been diagnosed and medicated, my bipolar II disorder no longer felt like one voice saying 30 things at once, but rather 30 different voices all saying one thing. If you’ve ever taught kindergarten or conducted a choir, you know that united noise is easier to process than scattered voices.

I’ve never done either of those things, but I get your point.

Whereas before there was chaos between my ears, now I can hear (AND listen to!) the people inside me. The poet, the activist, the wrestler, the lover, the cat, the priest, the cook, the collagist, and more are coming in loud and clear, harmonizing with the son, the uncle, the brother, and all the other external Sams.

The butcher, the baker, we know, we know.

In The Chase, viewers finally get an explanation for why every alien species in Trekdom looks mostly the same (bipedal, mammalian, etc.) except for the forehead ridges, or lack thereof. It turns out that Romulans, Cardassians, Klingons, Humans, and most of the sentient life in the galaxy came from a single progenitor, who spread their primordial seed across the universe.

We are a community, the episode postulates, whether we like it or not. Just like I learned to listen to (and love) the rest of me, we must begin loving each other before time runs out, or else we risk calcifying into Cardassians. Or worse…we risk becoming one of the species who didn’t make it to the summit on Vilmoran II, left behind or exploded thanks to intolerance, if not ineptitude, if not greed.

The Chase
Travel far afield
chasing after the seeds which yield
a community
with no strife or enmity.
Understand, that we are me.

While I cannot be all things to all people, I do contain multitudes, and I can be all things to me. But self-understanding does not mean self-sufficiency. As much as there is a world within us, there is a world without. And it is up to us to make this world one worthy of the living. Together.

Wait, was the audience dialogue conceit in this essay just another way to illustrate that an individual is a community, and that the inverse is also true?

Yep!