In my head a community is like those mats that children put wooden blocks painted like buildings and push cars around. Something like this:

And in the community people know each other and support each other. Small town England type stuff.

There are also the other types of community: people who go to the same place of worship, families, support groups, people with the same identity, people with the same diagnosis, people who went to the same school, maybe workplaces.

Others might say people in the same type of accommodation (or lack of) are a type of community – everyone on a housing estate, people in an HMO, people in a block of flats, people experiencing homelessness.

They are places of acceptance, support and encouragement. Where people with a commonality can find empathy and trust.

The dictionary definition aligns with my thinking.

However, that’s not my experience.

Communities for me are tricky places to navigate, filled with unspoken rules and hierarchies. Much like friendship circles at school.

My experience of the mental health illness world is very much like this. There are a series of bars against which you are measured. It covers every aspect of your health – diagnosis, how you got fucked up, medication, treatments, whether you’ve been hospitalised… Some things like being treated with lithium or electroconvulsive therapy/electric shock treatment got you instant respect.

So not the all-enveloping community you might imagine. But then it consists of people who are a bit mad (speaking as one of them). I fared well in all categories except treatments – lots of diagnoses with the first at the age of 16 and the current one sitting high in the rankings, I carry around a chunk of trauma, I’ve tried more types of medication for mental health than I have types of pie. It was only when I pulled away from engagement with mental health circles that I scored a ‘good’ treatment (EMDR). A story for another time perhaps.

The experience was not ostracising, more a community working out which circle of hell you fitted in so you could find yourself with like-minded individuals. Once in there, it was supportive but felt a little uncomfortable – all it took was a change in your health and you would get shouldered to another section.

As my mental health recovered, I found myself getting pushed out of the community. I found myself fighting with feelings of guilt that I was getting better. There was a strange internal battle between wanting to remain part of the community and wanting to recover, and it was hard. I was very lonely before I found that group of peers and I was heading towards, potentially, another lonely period.

Loneliness best describes my experience of “the homeless community” too. I sofa surfed so I never felt accepted when I went to day centres or drop ins. I found myself still going because being amongst people and being alone was an improvement on being alone in every sense of the word. It became more comfortable once I got enough headspace back to be able to read.

The day centre I went to most was 20p for a cup of tea if you took your own teabag.

I’d often sit there with my little sandwich bag of teabags from home drinking 20p cups of tea all day. One day one of the regulars put a pound coin in front of me and told me to eat something. I hadn’t realised anyone had ever really seen me before that, although I’d been going almost daily for weeks. I paid back the person later and got a gruff direction to sit with them watching TV. That was as close as I got to feeling a part of anything.

I think with mental health, you could go to anyone who has been through it and tell them something about your experience and you will find an acceptance. As an ex-sofa surfer my experience has never given me access to the so-called homeless community. That type of homelessness seems invalid within that world. I’ve never talked to another sofa surfer about it, so I don’t feel any kinship amongst others with that experience, much like I don’t feel a kinship with other people who have been to Rhyl (although there is a similar shared trauma).

Community seems much like any other type of social interaction – your experience will vary depending on a huge number of factors. I’m unsure there is any immediate acceptance in any social environment. Community appears to me to be a blanket term for something really quite nuanced. Just like life itself.