There’s so much rhetoric these days around being a villager, having a village, and all around just being better friends and community members.
We’re lonely and disconnected. We’re hyperconnected with access to so many people all the time, and yet we are relationally under-nourshied. And that’s exactly why I hosted a free community event IRL earlier this week. I wanted there to be a space, for just a few hours, where people could walk in and immediately feel a part of something, and feel connected to others.
This post and the reflections are inspired by the conversations that were had at this event. It was truly spectacular and special.
We keep saying we’re lonely, but what many of us are really grieving is the absence of a village. Not just people around us, but people who know us, hold us, remember us, and show up when we don’t know how to ask. For so many children of immigrants, the idea of a village was something we were told we had — family, community, culture — even when what we actually experienced was obligation without support, closeness without safety, and togetherness without emotional care.
I will always be a believer that our immigrant parents and elders can teach us so much about a community care and yet with my second- and third-gen clients, I hear time and time again that they are still struggling to find that community for themselves. I think a big part of this is because we are not only looking at cultural or religious spaces as the give-in for making friends.
The act of villaging is choosing to create the kind of community that is values-based and quality, not just about quantity. It means not waiting for connection to magically happen, and not assuming that needing people makes us weak. It means treating belonging as something we practice, not something we earn.
Ask yourself: What do I value in a friendship? Am I living by those values? Are the friends I have right now doing so?
For a long time, many of us learned that love was transactional. Be helpful and you get approval. Be easy and you get closeness. Be quiet and you get to stay. So we became very good at showing up for others, anticipating their needs, managing their emotions, and holding their pain. But we were rarely taught how to let someone hold us in return. The act of villaging — consiously — asks us to unlearn that. It invites us to receive care without feeling guilty, to let someone make us soup, to accept a check-in, to say yes when someone offers to stay.
One of the hardest parts of villaging is learning to be transparent and earnest. Many of us were raised in environments where saying what you actually felt was unsafe or inconvenient. So we learned to hint (and hope they’d just get it!), to downplay (I don’t want to burden anyone!), and often, to swallow our own needs. But real community cannot be built on guesswork.
The act of villaging requires us to name what we need out loud. It sounds like saying, “I’m struggling this week,” or “I don’t want to be alone tonight,” or “I need support, not advice.” That kind of clarity isn’t demanding. It is what makes connection possible. And on the flip side, it’s about imposing on our loved ones at least once — earnestly — to show our love and care.
And remember, asking for help is only step one… the harder step in my opinion is actually receiving the care when it is offered.
Ask yourself: Am I good at asking for help? Am I good at helping? Am I good at receiving care when it is offered?
Villaging is also about reciprocity, not transactions. In a village, no one is keeping score. Some seasons you give more, some seasons you need more. There’s a sense of trust and safety that it all evens itself out because the care is there and it flows in both directions over time.
Many of us — especially children and daughters of immigrants — are used to being the emotional glue in our relationships… the one who remembers, who reaches out, who holds space. That role often came from growing up in families where we had to be emotionally attuned to survive or take on more than was developmentally appropriate. But sustainable community cannot be built on one person always carrying everyone else. Villaging asks for shared responsibility. It asks us to let others show up for us too.
Ask yourself: In which relationships do I consistently carry more emotional labor and how could I do this 10% less?
A village is not just made of big moments. It is built through rituals. The weekly walk. The standing dinner. The connection over the mundane — picking up kids from school, grocery shopping, walking the dog. The voice note that says, “I was thinking of you.” The text that arrives without a crisis attached. These small, repeatable gestures are how people become woven into our lives. For children of immigrants especially, rituals are how love has always been expressed — through shared meals, routines, and showing up. We are not asking for more plans. We are often asking for more remembering.
Ask yourself: Where are there real pockets and ways I can be more connected to people who feed my soul — even if in micro moments?
Villaging also means staying when things get uncomfortable. Real community is not conflict-free. It requires repair to be sustainable over different phases of life. It requires a mutual willingness to talk about hurt, to apologize, to try again instead of disappearing. What I have learned is that losing friendships can be one of the most painful heartaches we navigate. And many times these lost friendships are not because something went wrong, but because one or both people didn’t know how to stay when it did. A village is built by people who don’t run the first time things get messy. And as someone who has, in the past, avoided discomfort or accountability, I know how hard this can be.
Ask yourself: What hard conversation or truth am I avoiding in a friendship right now? How can I be more vulnerable?
And finally, villaging means choosing values over convenience. We are no longer just looking for people who are available. We are looking for people who are aligned, who respect boundaries, who understand culture and context, who know how to hold grief, joy, and complexity without turning away. Community today is less about who is around us and more about how we are treated.
For so many of us, this work feels tender because we are learning to unlearn what we’ve been taught about relationships and our role in them, and we are learning to ask and receive.
You deserve to have spaces where you don’t have to perform, or prove yourself constantly, or make yourself small. This starts with being honest with yourself about how you show up as a friend, and being honest with yourself about who you are friends with right now.
Ask yourself: Who has shown they are here for me and has shown up, but I haven’t noticed or appreciated it because I may be focused more on the relationships that hurt or show up less?
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Thinking about how I model this for my kids, so they learn to build genuine “villages” and be part of our own while being their authentic selves
The line that stopped me: "we are not only looking at cultural or religious spaces as the give-in for making friends." That's the tension I sit with most as a Hong Kong immigrant raising a daughter in Australia with no family nearby.
The village I grew up with wasn't chosen — it was inherited. Grandparents, aunties, neighbours who'd known my parents for decades. It existed before I did. What I'm trying to build for my daughter is something different — constructed rather than inherited, intentional rather than assumed. And there's something quietly disorienting about that. Not because the people aren't good, but because the density isn't there. The accumulated history. The people who remember her from before she could talk.
What I'm still working out is what I owe her in that gap — whether it's my job to build that village harder, or to help her understand that her village might look genuinely different to mine, and that different doesn't mean lesser. Probably both. But your framing of villaging as something we practice rather than earn is helping me hold that question with a bit more patience.