nicky flowers

sorry for the delay. I do see your vision! it's not far off from the vision I had for coelary honestly. which means I think it can work. I will tell you how I made it work. it is tough, but it's also everything. you have to make Life into your hobby, your main pass time. your purpose. your calling.

I've tried really hard to get to know life and living it. What is it? I figure that humans are defined largely by their experiences, the things they have witnessed and felt and sensed, the things they share together. so I figured that a good way to figure out what Life is would be to gain as many experiences as I can. The bigger the better. As far away from what I was familiar with as possible. I had to work past or through many anxieties and challenges in order to do this. I had to take my problems seriously and address them aggressively so they would not slow me down or stop me. I had to constantly figure out where the edge of my comfort zone was, and then push it. ESPECIALLY if i really did not want to. I had to learn what living is about. I had to try things, I had to be bold, I had to risk seeming foolish or annoying or ignorant and not care about it because I had a goal that was bigger than anyone's fleeting opinion of me: I had to live. I have to live. I failed a lot, but each failure was just another opportunity to learn about life. It's really difficult to feel held back by anything when you are seeing it through the lens of "this is life, and I'm experiencing it!" because every challenge or failure is just another experience. I cannot lose.

I started making coelary not primarily because I like bugs or sci fi or slice of life fiction (though those all are true) but because living is really hard and I wanted to make something that embodied, in some small way, the way that life is hard. something that spoke to my experiences, and the experiences of my friends. and especially, something that brought other people into it so they can share their stories as well. I created comics and stories and pictures that were drawn directly from my life experiences, instead of being some escape from them - something that people could see and go "that's what it is like!" even the porn i draw is made with this in mind. by never letting myself be motivated by peer pressure or anxiety or fomo or idleness, i was able to keep my creativity - and, truth be told, my presence on the whole of the internet - focused entirely on that original purpose: living, and knowing what it's like to live. and this connected me to people who, maybe unbeknownst to themselves, had also this desire to live. to live their whole life and to live it well. a discipline of kindness and compassion is a big part of that but you've already read my big post about kindness so I won't rehash that here. Just remember that kindness and compassion is core to this discipline.

i started my Bug Crew discord server in 2019. i was not already friends with every single person who joined it, I barely knew anything about them except their profile picture via my notifications on Twitter, tumblr, etc. but through that server, I have become irl friends with at least a dozen of them, and met many more in person at cons or whatnot. Through that server, I have helped people move out of their parents house for the first time. I have helped people transition. Through that server, I have introduced people who later fell in love and moved in together. This community has helped people escape abuse, it has helped people find themselves and their partners, it has helped people truly start living their life. It has enabled people with privilege to lift up those without, allowing bug crew members to couch surf or borrow a guest bed if they didn't otherwise have anywhere else to go. It brought people who otherwise had no community together, in person, for fellowship and friendship and love. I'm reasonably confident that nobody else will see this comment which is why I'm not afraid of being accused of tooting my own horn, but honestly, I feel like I barely did anything but start the server and speak my truth through comics - they're the ones who make it happen. I just facilitated the connection. I also try very hard to give them things to look forward to, like biyearly parties where we can hang out and have fun together. build new experiences together. you gotta give people things to look forward to!! it's essential for community building.

i don't really have a good way to conclude this but I'll leave you with a checklist of really important points if you want to go from "internet acquaintances" to "community":

• make a personal effort to connect to each person in your community. know them and keep up with them and care about what happens to them
• make an effort to get unacquainted people some common ground to get to know each other: shared interest, similar background, etc etc
• have shared experiences together. this builds trust and love. you must share experiences together
• defeat the impulse to be negative
• show interest in what people do. if you see someone post and nobody else has commented, be the one who does. build them up. find something nice to say
• kindness does not automatically mean "no boundaries", nor does conflict automatically mean "bad". learn to recognize the difference between healthy conflict and unhealthy conflict, and learn your boundaries so you can assert them when needed
• you will need to leave some things behind in order to become the person, and to make the community, that you want to make. nothing is more important than being able to give up something you love in order to gain something you need.
• cultivate compassion constantly. this means finding a way to understand even the people who piss you off the most, and develop a mental framework that allows you to not hate them. you don't have to excuse their actions or allow them into your space if they're likely to harm someone, but you don't have to hate them. hate will erode you inside while doing nothing to change them nor the world they live in.

that's all I got! for now. I hope it helps. all we have is one life so it is better to live it well and to do things together.