“If your community has no place for the difficult, maddening, awful, irritating, frustrating people within it, the weak ones, the troubled ones, the mentally ill, the physically ill, the demanding, the ones who always bring up the same dumb point, the ones who make you want to scream when they talk – if it has no place for the real, actual people in it, we are failing. Community is community – it is all the people who show up, all the people who are present, all the people who are simply there – the ones you like, the ones you don’t like and all the ones in between. If you find yourself casting them off because you are too busy saving the world, you have to be reminded what, exactly, it is you are saving.”
— Sharon Astyk at Casaubon’s Book. Bathtubs: A Theory of Community Relations (via protoslacker)