Find your tribe, a long-standing friend of mine said very recently.

As a recovering people addict and bonafide member of Co-Dependents Anonymous, finding a “tribe” is hard to do when you’ve spent years developing the art of isolation in order to stay away and out of range from as many people as possible.

I don’t mix and mingle with crowds as much as I used to, but suffice it to say that I am a long way from the months on end when I couldn’t even stand to be in the same room with white females, or in any room where I was the sole Black person in the room.

Any white woman who was around me had better be accompanied by a Black person, and there better be plenty of cameras, recording equipment and video cams around if they were. While being taught to be wholly and functionally racist by racist whites, I also learned that “all skinfolk ain’t kinfolk,” either.

White people taught me how to be as horrifically bigoted and hateful as they were born and raised to be.

There wasn’t a day from the 1960s to the 1990s when any Black person I had ever been around or grown up with or was raised by had taught me to hate whites; it was white people themselves that led me down the primrose path of hatred of white people. Benevolent whites with proper education and the demeanor of common sense and knowledge of fragile humanity are easily forgotten when overshadowed by the majorum … the crude, selfish, despicable, deplorable, ungodly, and most ghastly members of their own race.

Now, four years into the recovery process of being the most “wide open loving caring giving” woman I’ve ever known, a woman who knew no boundaries and had no self-contained or self-righteous, self-styled ability to judge or hate anyone, I have learned the importance of boundaries. And it only took me 55 years to figure it out. “Such a martyr” has turned into “damned right I’m smarter.”

Boundaries -drawing lines around certain parameters in your life when it comes to others- means not only doling out only ‘one-shot’ chances, but topping it off with that “you got one time to screw over me…once.” Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, well … d’uh.

Being a co-dependent or “people addict” ends up exhibiting the same types of behaviors as if I had been a recovering drug addict or alcoholic, or had any other types of substance or chemical addictions. The actions, and the results of those actions, are typically the exact same.

Co-dependents of drug and sex addicts either become enablers of the addictive behaviors, or at the very least, so highly sensitized to addictive behaviors that they start to act ‘as if’ they are one of the under-crowd that they tend to emotionally service and support.

Forgiveness is Key for a Recovering Co-Dependent

The two main things to keep in mind when forgiving others who have hurt and harmed you is that they still have to suffer the consequences of their actions, and you are not required to stick around and hug them and leave the door open for them to do it again. Forgive in order to get the person’s psyche and emotional drama off your back, then let the rest of the matter be what it is.

The Search Is On…

Is there a criteria list for finding a Tribe, or a group of like-minded persons with similar goals and ideas to hang out with? In particular, recovering “peopleholics” should be careful of coming out of their self-acquired shell or trying to re-orient to the at-large public, because it is easy to go back into the wrong behaviors if the right people with the right conversations are not sought out and examined for personal belief systems, and any other kind of ‘background noise’ that could end up blurring the presets.

America itself has always been territorial, “Clique Central.” Within subsets of persons and personalities, the world at-large has always been a clique-ish arena in which to wheel and deal. Many of those cliques are skin color related with token members tossed in for seasoning.

However, in order for me to “find my Tribe,” I’d have to be willing to sit in a room filled with a bunch of white upscale technological, scientific, political, economic, and social intellects who are at least 40 years of age and up…knowing that I will likely always be the only “milk chocolate drop” in the room. Along with that, I ultimately get to answer for the entire Black race for all of its manifold sins and misgivings every time they want to know “why” something is what it is with Black Americans. #BlackTax

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The answer is usually logical enough even for a bona’fide closet racist. For the same reasons whites do what they do, think what they think, and act the way they act, Black people in America are the exact same — only WITH the skin color racism that whites who act the same will never get. Note: “Acting like a nigger” is not limited to Blacks behaving badly. Some whites are bigger niggers than any Black person ever dreamed of being.

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On ‘Belongingness”

The indomitable “they” say no one should isolate themselves. An isolated person, “they” say, will either go stir crazy with the desire for human interaction, or they will learn to live with the stark deep pain of loneliness.

When looking for a place to belong, all that needs to be considered is who you are, what kinds of things you like, and what you would like to learn or become in the days, weeks, months, and years to follow. And also an understanding that not all “tribes” are created equal, nor were they meant to last forever. At some point, dissolution is a standard of life that seems to never go away.

That said, I am considered to be a Black female version of a fictional character by the name of “Frasier Crane.”

Stolid, smart, witty, honest, lovable, wonderful sense of humor, and able to resolve problems for others, but never for myself. Transparent and fun-loving, always looking for the intellectual crowd when it comes to stimulating and deep spiritual conversation, loves culture, music and the arts, good wines and exotic tastes; yet always on a quest to bring joy to the tribal lives of those who can never bring joy to me.

And the beat goes on…