WOW! Another essay on the importance of community!

Man, I’m over here trying to build the Library of Alexandria of everyone I’ve ever met

By: Jasmine Shi

Date Posted: Oct 10, 2025

me and the homies crafting the cumulative knowledge of each other (Woodrow White)

Personal essays such as this one and other fun stuff are regularly updated on my Substack.

Attempting to gauge the extremities of your problems alone is difficult — personal bias distorts your reality. You can’t find the exit if you think north is south and south is north. In my case, my mistakes, perceived shortcomings, and my diagnoses are all conflated into something isolating and labyrinth-like. But the moment my being is collided and reverberated with others and their respective problems, nothing seemed to be as awful as I thought. This doesn’t eradicate the problem, nor does this invalidate its associated feelings, but the power seems to shrink.

Conversely, you’ll feel like shit when you talk to somebody who lost their leg and you’re over here crying over a papercut. It’s an instinct to feel ashamed and hide your own problems. “It’s all about perspective!” is a good rule of thumb — but it still lacks depth. So we’re back to the age-old dilemma of trying to maintain the health of your community whilst honoring your own.

The rule I previously (lowkey I’m still trying to work out of this) held was, “If I have the energy to give, I will give.” This seems fine and fair, but quickly this mutates into “If I have energy at all, I must give.”

See how I’m conflating my emotions with my problems? Ticket #1 is the perception that I’m not doing enough to act right by the people who care for me, showing gratitude and kindness like the way they’ve shown me. With this, I must compensate, give all I have. (We can go into the perceived nobility of extreme sacrifice and the need to give back its equivalent in immigrant families later).

Call me a people pleaser, but my chronic fatigue leaves me with finite windows of living properly. I strategize my schedule not on my availability of time, but my availability of energy. It’s like having a well that’s only full maybe once or twice a day, 30-60 minutes each time (these days, even this estimation feels generous). With the amount of people I want to care for, a lot of them are going to be thirsty.

I’m always going to find a way to tie the 2020 adaptation of Emma into something

I’ve tried taking “me days” and solo dates, but afterwards, I become no more energized and fulfilled than I was before. So where does the solution find me? There’s a slight caveat in the previous statement; I went on a solo hike along the Point Lobos shore, assuming that I would have to navigate the unfamiliar wilderness alone. But I wasn’t alone! Sure, no one was hiking by my side, but I received help and allowances along the way. There were the rangers at the entrance who kept watch over my luggage, and my beloved stuffed wolf, which the lady ranger gingerly handed him back to me, saying, “Here’s your plushie!” And the blonde ranger who let me use his telescope and guided me to a wild seal lazily swaying on a rock. “They like to sleep during the day and hunt during the night,” he informed. And who could forget the granny ranger, giving me pamphlets and maps of all the birds and plants I can find around the park. “If it’s in threes, leave it be, if it’s shiny, watch your hiney,” she preached.

(I’m also going to note that the only reason why I was at these trails to begin with was because of a free ride offered to me by an Uber driver I met who was glad I could understand Chinese; later that day, she called me to make sure I made it to the airport on time. Ily Shufang Ayi <3)

Reconnecting with nature is great, having people gently guide you on how to do it is spectacular. Feelings are always fleeting, but the freshness I felt afterwards was indelible.

I’m not not going to include the photos I took of all these seals (I saw 3, nbd)

I’m exhausted by a lot of things, but a big one is the tough guy trope, one who must suffer alone, maybe even in hopes of being elegized. I mistook isolation with healing, shame with humility. And I’m not the only one who sees and feels the transformation when this gets out of hand, the sickness that grows with the resentment against your loved ones.

So the methodology may lie in another simplified message: sharing is caring. Not necessarily in material or emotional means, but means of information. It doesn’t have to involve exposing your entire internal world; start with sharing what you can easily put into words. How do you feel about a movie? What are some tips for developing your hobby? What gets you out of bed every day? The answers don’t have to be refined or even thoughtful; they just have to represent some form of authenticity. Seemingly trivial pieces of information can be built to become grander ideas, such as the collective goal of knowing enough about each other when something is wrong. You trust your emergency contact to tell the doctor what you’re allergic to when you’re unconscious; having stores of knowledge can save lives, physically and emotionally.

A working measurement of intimacy that I have is the amount of knowledge someone has about me. My relationships aren’t based on longevity, but more so on the accumulation of knowledge and how the knowledge is interpreted. The willingness to share can be very telling; you’ll often see studies of likability (it’s questionable if there’s much inherent value in this) and friendships (actual value) and find that the word open pops up. The chances of which two are equally open to knowing each other are rare; when you find this opportunity, cherish it, and think it is beloved.

However, nobody is able to know everything, that’s just the nature of evolution. Our states of constant change make it so that trying to collect the whole almanac of a person is like collecting water with just your hands. But the load of carrying your entire self is paralyzing; community exists to relieve and cherish the various parts of you. Think about the people who know your habits, your body, your love, your own knowledge of them. Separately, it seems peripheral, but when viewed together, you’ll see a network of people who place you into a reality in which you are whole. People have bits and pieces of me, past me’s, and theories about the future me. I’m placing my hope with the threads that will braid me into a person who’s strong enough to do right by them.