I was pulling at the grass on the Lower Field, talking about McGill with all the naïve excitement of a quintessential first-year, when my friend (Canadian, white) said she was scared of “adult loneliness.” Once you graduate, she said, you never really see anyone again unless you really try. The other friend (American, white) nodded instantly, as if this were obvious.

I had no idea what they were talking about. 

Growing up in the Arab diaspora meant that friendships didn’t disappear when the school year ended or when people moved to another country. Every weekend, you were dropped into some auntie’s basement with thirty kids and no adult supervision, and told, “play.” You hated half of them on principle; someone was always crying, someone tattled, and someone broke something. Repeat the next weekend. Travel didn’t save you either. You’d land in another country, and someone you’ve never met would have already been notified. Suddenly, you were on her plastic-covered couch drinking tea you didn’t want.

Eventually, you learn that showing up isn’t a choice; you inherit community, whether you want it or not. It’s an intergenerational debt you keep paying because your parents once needed someone else to pay it. This is the part that Westerners don’t understand: They view culture as an external container instead of a system they actively co-create, and that misunderstanding is part of why they perceive adult loneliness as inevitable.

As capitalism begins to lose its shine, 20-somethings in the West have grown hungry for community. They cosplay it in their Plateau apartment ‘friendsgivings’ and their shared grocery lists. But ask them to clean the kitchen and suddenly there’s an hour-long household meeting about who’s responsible for wiping down the counters. In my world, that conversation would be humiliating. You clean the kitchen because you use it. Because other people use it. Because the space isn’t just yours.

Community, as Arabs practice it, is not gentle. It is surveillance, obligation, and being witnessed in moments you’d prefer to hide. It is unglamorous labour. You don’t get the luxury of pretending your actions don’t affect anyone. If you disappoint someone, you fix it because you will see them again. If you don’t show up, people notice. If you leave a mess, it becomes everyone’s burden. Western individualism, on the other hand, is built on the assumption that you can always leave—the city, the friend group, the relationship. If you’ve spent your whole life believing you are free from obligation, the moment a community requires anything from you, it starts feeling like a constraint. But that’s exactly why diasporic communities survive: People understand they’re accountable to something larger than their own feelings in the moment, something that predates them and that will outlast them by decades. They behave accordingly.

There were years when I wanted nothing more than to escape this inherited debt. To have the clean, quiet, independent adulthood I imagined white Canadians grew up expecting, one where you choose your people and draw boundaries without guilt. 

Then, my grandmother died. People I hadn’t spoken to in years came to our home to honour her with a khitma, a funeral ceremony where the Qur’an is divided among everyone and read piece by piece until the whole thing is completed. Every auntie showed up: The ones who barely knew us, the ones who didn’t like us, the ones who always kept their distance. They came carrying food, children, plastic bags filled with whatever they thought might help. They lined the walls of our house, Qur’ans in hand, and read until the entire 600 pages were done in less than an hour. There were so many women present that each of them carried only a sliver of the burden.

Moments like this remind me that community isn’t about intimacy or affection; it’s about dependability. You can dislike each other, avoid each other, forget each other, but none of this will absolve you of your obligation to one another. It’s not always pleasant, but it’s how we survive.