Finding Community
I think David is the first person so far to talk about coming to Carapace with the intention of finding community:
and when I came down here
I saw a Scoutmob ad for Carapace
and it was just like a way to find my community in Atlanta.
This makes total sense. I realized in high school that most of my friend were in marching band. That was my community. I sought out another activity in college (Phi Kappa Literary and Debate Society) as a way of finding my new community. And now many of my friends come from the storytelling community. Going to an event like Carapace shortly after moving to a new city seems like a great strategy for making new friends.
This is one of the Carapace aspects I'm pleased about. People are very lonely, even those who have a close family and plenty of friends. There's a quality of togetherness that communal storytelling of this kind provides ... it's hard to describe. (I believe our best stories attempt to describe what's impossible to tell; they try anyhow.) It's not encapsulated by the stranger-on-the-bus phenomenon, like you hear so many people say. It's a sticky, difficult, rather complicated kind of warmth that certain people, not everybody, are able to tolerate, even welcome.
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