Finding community as an adult might be the hardest part about being an adult.
When you’re younger, your community is decided by your school, sports, or other activities your parents take you to. Theater, bowling leagues, even things like ninja gyms, all exist to you only in relation to the adults who can drive you to those ongoing events. And making friends is a bit easier when you have that activity in common.
But as you grow up and leave your parents, you have to take the initiative to create those opportunities. They don’t just fall in your lap like they used to. Other than friends at work, most people you interact with you have to choose to see and hang out with. And time is precious! As working adults, we tend to have less time and energy than we did as carefree children.
That’s where aerial comes in. Taking classes provides a great opportunity to meet women from all around Green Bay and Appleton that you might not otherwise see in your “normal life.” Learning together to do something as intricate and amazing as aerial provides easy conversation topics for those of us a little more shy (including me!). It’s simple to remark on the difficulty of a skill or encourage another person when they do well. Then you start to ask questions and you learn these women all have insanely different jobs than you, or that they have cute pets at home and you immediately ask to see pictures.
And as time goes by, you go to classes again and again, and you start to see the same people in your classes. You get to know them little by little, finding other things in common like books or sports teams you both like. Then there’s the cool other events Aerial Dance puts on, like the movie nights or a book club. These social events are part of building a community, and are just as important as going to classes themselves.
Suddenly, you realize that you’ve formed relationships with these women who you would have never known if not for aerial. There’s a community around you full of encouraging and supportive people who have a wide range of knowledge and can help in a crisis. And you keep going to classes so you can get better and stronger at your chosen aerial apparatuses! And when you get there, you can be confident that you are building the foundations for your community.