Someone who auditioned for Biggest Loser once told me that just waiting in the line, he knew he had found his tribe. These overweight yet energetic, determined-to-change, extroverted spotlight-seekers were just like him, and it was revelatory to find hundreds of them in one place.

I find variations of my tribe often, mostly in folk-dancing groups. I also feel the urge to break into a new tribe though, and I think that is harder to do.

One way is to try new things, which I am sort of doing by working in an alternative medical office. I had already observed that the US conventional medicine model is not very successful in preventing disease, possibly because it does not even considering that a goal, but the full immersion definitely contains aspects that lead a STEM major to raise her eyebrows. Aside from eyebrow ascension, I am deploying my efforts toward excellent results for my new work-tribe.

I have made friends-for-life from work-tribes, but those groups are less reliable than life-tribes because they can dissipate rapidly. I found a new life-tribe by becoming a docent in marine science, an interest I hadn’t previously had time to pursue. I still don’t have time to immerse myself in it, but I do lots of things I couldn’t do before, like answer visitor questions on the wharf and contribute to iNaturalist.

Sometimes a current friend who intersects me in one tribe reveals a connection to another: friends here have introduced us to the music and celebration of rural Italy. Sometimes I create a tribe by following my own interests: I am always happy to meet a fellow nutrition geek. 

Tribe-seeking is part of us. I have read that it is innate for humans to practice loyalty over truth-telling, because social connections are paramount for our survival. I’m reading the Earth’s Children series by Jean Auel, which certainly imagines the source of social survival convincingly, but I hope that I won’t take tribalism quite that far.