The Village We Lost

I've been thinking about how strange it is that asking a neighbour for a cup of sugar apparently used to be the most normal thing in the world, and now most of us would rather drive to the shop at nine at night than knock on a door and admit we're short of something. I think we often do this without even thinking too. I know I do. I am actively practicing the art of asking my 'virtual commune' for resources before I spend the money on them. We are even looking at purchases for use by each other, where we don't have something. It's a real learning curve!

It wasn't so long ago that women lived properly inside a village, not just geographically but practically, with other women, often family, a few doors down who'd have your children for an hour without it being a whole arrangement, who'd notice if your washing hadn't come in and pop round to ask if you were alright, who you could borrow from and lend to without anyone keeping score. Nobody thought you were failing at life because you needed a hand. Needing a hand was simply what living near other women meant. That web of small, unglamorous, everyday support was what actually kept people upright, far more than any single person's grit or organisation ever could.

We don't really have that any more, most of us, and I think we've quietly absorbed the loss of it as a personal failing rather than what it actually is, which is a structural one. We live in smaller units now, further apart, behind our own front doors, each of us running our own household like a one-woman operation, and somewhere along the way needing other people started to feel like an admission that you can't cope, rather than simply how humans were always meant to live. So we don't ask. We manage. We tell ourselves we're fine, right up until we're really not, and even then we apologise before we ask for help, as though needing someone is the shameful, embarrassing part rather than a completely ordinary fact of being a person.

Here's what I keep seeing, though, in the women I sit across from and the women in my own life. The ones who seem to have the most support around them aren't the ones who worked out some clever system for extracting it. They're the ones who give it away freely, who show up for other women without keeping a tally, who celebrate someone else's win instead of quietly measuring it against their own. And it isn't a coincidence. Supporting another woman, properly and without an agenda, is what actually builds the kind of relationship where support flows back to you too, later, when you need it and didn't even have to ask.

I think a lot of us were taught, without anyone ever saying it outright, that there's only so much room at the top, so much attention, so much success, so much space to be seen, and that if another woman is taking up some of it, there's less left over for you. It shows up in business as much as it does in friendship, maybe more, this instinct to see other women as competition rather than company.

But I don't think it's true, and I don't think it was ever true. Lifting someone else up doesn't use up space. It tends to make more of it, because the woman you helped remembers, and shows up for you, and tells someone else about you, and somewhere in there a whole new kind of village starts building itself back, one small act of generosity at a time.

I really 100% believe that there is room for all of us. Room for all the mothers, coaches, all the VAs, marketers, lawyers, friends - all the people offering valuable resources, skill and time. Because not everyone is a fit for everyone else. We meet and work and play and connect with those who intuitively sing similar and complimentary songs to us.

There's something else underneath all this too, which is closer to the actual work I do. You cannot see yourself clearly from inside yourself, not really, not for the things that matter most. None of us can. That's exactly why identity shifts are so disorientating to move through alone, whether it's motherhood, or a career ending, or simply not recognising your own life any more. You need other people around you who can hold up a mirror, who've been through their own version of it, who can say "yes, that, I know that feeling" without you having to explain the whole thing from the beginning. That used to be what a village was for. Not fixing you, just witnessing you, so you didn't have to carry it entirely alone.

I don't think we can rebuild an actual village, not the kind our grandmothers had, all in one go. But I think we can practise it in small, deliberate ways, in the friendships we choose to invest in properly, in the other women we champion rather than quietly compare ourselves to, in simply being the kind of woman who'd notice if someone's washing hadn't come in.

Ask for the cup of sugar. Offer it before you're asked. Let it be ordinary again.