French existentialist Jean Paul-Sartre says that one’s existence comes into being from the “gaze” of the other, and that shame is the overarching product of this autonomy-robbing recognition.
Jean Paul-Sartre was probably not very fun at parties.
Community was never something I had really sought before Longwood, but rather something that occasionally happened to me as I went about other pursuits. My HONS 495 class Love, Sex, and Friendship introduced me to Sartrean existentialism and its flaws, upon which time I realized how dysfunctionally I had been living my life with highly similar, somewhat subconscious convictions. Concurrently, I had happened into joining Longwood’s chapter of Alpha Phi Omega, a co-ed service fraternity that semester, with about the same conviction that I make most such decisions: almost zero. I must say however, that both that class and APO have changed my life for the better. While it is not easy to cast behind me the social anxiety that led me to reinvent the existentialist wheel, it is indescribably wonderful to belong and have people to smile with around campus. Your head is a bad place to get trapped and finding a community (whether abstract or formal) you are comfortable in is the best way out.