This moment reminds us what makes a "community." (That's why you can't stop thinking about Anna Delvey, either)

If you’re as fanatical as I am about NY Magazine’s lifestyle section, The Cut, then you’re familiar with the column “I think about this a lot”. Ironically, I’ve been thinking about Anna Delvey after NY Magazine published Anna’s story years ago and Netflix has launched a star-clad miniseries depicting the near-true sequence of events.??

As Russia continues to invade Ukraine this week, I can’t stop thinking of Anna Delvey, the “fake German heiress,” as the fan t-shirts refer to her. And I can’t stop thinking about all the employee groups at my corporate job who have nobly insisted that we talk about identity through the pandemic, through Black Lives Matter and through violence against our Asian and Pacific Islander community. I can’t stop thinking that it’s time for all of us to reckon with our identities, whether we’re ethnic, LGBTQ, feminist, or anything else true to us.

Sidebar: My media team at work and I just published a video to celebrate my identity within a series we call “A Million Data Points”. Hope you like it.

It’s time for us to realize we already belong to a global community, together. I mean it: you and I already belong here. We should feel damn good about that and help others to feel the same.

Why I’m writing this: alienation

I’m writing to you from California as a Ukrainian American woman who has resented her identity as a Ukrainian - a “Uke” – for most of my life. Like Anna Delvey, all I ever wanted was to belong to a tribe. I didn’t feel welcomed by Ukrainian Americans as I continued to speak English, so I felt lonely. I felt desperate enough to understand today why Anna created an entire fake life to prove she was good enough to belong. Anna clearly is good enough; she is smart as hell. I clearly am good enough; instead of conning New York’s art world, I found a home using my English skills in Silicon Valley.

How I’m writing this: practice

That whole theory that Malcolm Gladwell writes about, that if you practice anything for 10,000 hours, you're likely going to get decent at that thing? I get that. And that whole thing Keith Urban shared on Conan O’Brien’s podcast, that he's just always been a musician, for as long as he can remember? I get that, too. I’ve always been a writer.

As a kid, I wrote in my diary to assign words to what I was feeling. I journaled until 3am, sometimes 4am or even 5am, to document my experiences and then milk them for life lessons. As I grew up, my little diaries would go everywhere I went: to the Australian outback, to the rolling greens of Ireland, to Trident Booksellers on Newbury Street in Boston. Painfully honest journaling became my version of Catholic confession, with the diary as my priest.?

That’s how I learned to write about my truth. It took 10,000 hours of practice.

I wanted the same thing Anna wanted; in the pandemic era, so do you?

Looking through my old journals – now crusted with ‘90s and 2000s-era milk or gel pen buildup – I see a common theme in my stories. I studied, maddeningly, what triggered me to feel upset or delighted, alienated or welcomed. I learned what it is that people do to genuinely support each other. I learned what makes a real community. Not a BS “community” that requires me to earn my seat through personal output like speaking a language flawlessly or earning awards, but one that pulls another chair to the table to beckon me in, simply because I’m inherently valuable.

Anna’s story, similarly, is all about what it takes to belong – and how that journey goes awry when communities demand that you "earn" your way in. While watching the scenes where Anna slips hotel staff $100 bills as tips, the hair on my arms pricked up. I recalled how many favors and gifts I’ve similarly given to people over the years, hoping for a similar transaction for love and belonging. ("What will you do for me?" is the single phrase that indicates transactional love, and I sense Anna has heard that as often as I have.) The yearning for the safety of a non-transactional, non-judgmental tribe: That’s what I wanted. That’s what Anna wanted.

Isn’t that what you’ve wanted, too?

In the pandemic era, all of us have experienced the most extreme polarities of opinion. From politics to vaccine mandates to violence against ethnicities and racial/sexual/gender identities – it feels like every topic has separated us into a clear tribe of us vs. them.

Such tribalism has not exactly helped us feel safer or better, because such isolationism doesn’t actually lead to better decisions or the best input of ideas. Instead, such tribalism has led to isolated communities feeling terrified into emotional decision making. That fear and insecurity is what leads to totalitarianism worldwide, as historian Anne Applebaum has written about extensively. Trump and Putin and Kim Jong-un became who they are because they’re insecure men (the book by Donald Trump’s niece said it all); yet they stay in power from convincing others to become equally insecure.

I’ve admired how Marianne Williamson (remember the “spiritual guru” who ran for the US presidency in 2020?) talks about this human behavior as making decisions from the frightened ego, rather than from a confident sense of love.

Anna wanted love. I wanted love. Haven’t you wanted love, too??

Our experience with Anna’s story correlates to our experience with the pandemic era and, now, with Ukraine’s invasion

As Russian troops continue to invade Ukraine this week, citizens around the world have demonstrated an extreme pride for and solidarity with the Ukrainian resistance. I know – because I’ve received an outpouring of love from all corners of my relationships. People I’ve met during my career or internships or travels have picked up the phone to hear my voice and help Ukrainians feel supported right now. That’s real community love. (There is way more that NATO needs to do ASAP, but I’ll leave that for another article.)

There is zero coincidence that citizens around the world – including European nations, issuing unprecedented unity against Russia -- ?are riding the pendulum from the fight-or-flight, terrified tribalism of the pandemic period to a true, more grounded sense of community and support in March 2022. Tribalism has not been working. It has been exhausting and maddening for every one of us, whether we'll admit it or not. Over a year into the “Great Resignation,” we see that simply quitting our jobs for new ones did not solve our still-terrible, still-unhealthy experience.

So we swung on the pendulum to try something new: we're trying the hope that Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukrainians have been advocating. Trying the lessons that we were all supposed to learn from watching Star Wars and Lord of the Rings while growing up. Zelensky is a real-life Luke Skywalker. He is our real-life Strider.

True to the lessons of the fellowship, we are choosing to stop making decisions from the scared ego, and instead deciding with love to do the right thing. Supporting our unified community of human beings is the right thing. ?

Let’s all try to make such alienation passe, starting with this moment

Leading with fear and ego leads to alienation in lots of odd forms. To Anna Delvey ripping off elite New Yorkers. To me filling hundreds of journals rather than getting sleep. To Ukrainians having their own sovereign home scorched before them.

Let’s make such alienation a relic of the past. Every one of us is part of making that happen. Strider wouldn’t have accomplished shit without his trusty hobbits. Everyone, including you, has a superpower to help this effort. ?

I like what I’m seeing with your support of Ukraine. Keep applying that kind of love across your life, even if it means being a tiny bit more kind to people around you. We need to teach and embolden the world to act with confidence and love.

It will take 10,000 hours of practice, yes. But nothing worth doing is easy.