I was once engaged to be married.
For reasons I still don’t understand, my partner’s parents hated me and without warning, on Christmas morning, they refused to let me into their home.
I was crushed (and stranded), so I did what I have done throughout my life: I called my big brother.
He’s a Church of England priest and was leading a small church in the next town, and he invited me to stay with him and his family.
Later that day we sat down for Christmas lunch, but it wasn’t what I expected. We were sat in someone else’s home at a huge shared table. My brother’s family were running around the kitchen preparing a massive amount of food for a crowd of honoured guests: the coffee shop servers, the shopping centre cleaners, and supermarket shelf stackers. The migrant workers who couldn’t afford to go home to spend Christmas with their family.
Of course, I couldn’t understand the pressure and pain of their reality, but for the first time I knew something of what loneliness feels like at that time of year and the blistering joy of when someone has the courage to meet you in the middle of it.
At that shared table, we feasted, pulled crackers, and told jokes.
And for a few hours, circumstance, loneliness, and isolation, softened its grip.
The extra seat
That Christmas, my brother didn’t give me advice. He didn’t tell me how to fix the situation or send me resources on healing from rejection. He made space for me. He found another chair and offered me a seat.
He showed me I wasn’t alone by making sure I wasn’t alone.
No one earned their place. Status, credentials, or network potential, didn’t matter. We simply arrived, stranded in one way or another.
Although I knew my life was immeasurably more secure than the people around me, for a few hours, we were just friends sharing a meal.
The table levelled us.
This is what genuine community does. It doesn’t instruct from a distance. It wades into the flood with you, creating space in the moment you feel stranded. It pulls up a chair and offers you a seat.
And yet, despite having our own experiences of this, many of us still strive in isolation. It’s not a choice we’ve made consciously. We’re not trying to be tortured geniuses facing the world alone. We just haven’t named community as something structural.
Not optional enrichment we get to enjoy once we’ve earned it, but part of the very architecture a sustainable practice is built on.
Something that requires intentional investment.
Because doing it your way is the only way, and community is how you find it.
What you’re missing
When you build alone, you’re not just missing emotional support. You’re missing the vital context your practice needs.
Think about the success stories for a moment. The ones with the waiting list, the limited spaces, the high-ticket offer, and the testimonials to match.
Strip away the heavily curated personal brand and what you’ll find is context. People who had a pre-existing audience they could activate (or one they purchased), connections that could open doors, or a safety net that allowed for bold risks.
What feels like strategy is often fortune.
They can wrap it in a curriculum, slap a price tag on it, and collect a handful of testimonials. But their approach fails most people because most people don’t have the same underlying advantages that accelerated their success.
So what do you have?
The extra seat. If you’re willing to take it.
Community is the one thing that can reliably level the playing field. Not by handing you a map, but by wading with you, replacing the fear you woke up with this morning with the quiet relief of being known.
And from that shared table, the missing context begins to find its shape.
Revealing the questions you were missing, the introductions you could not force, and the friction required to make hard decisions. The company you keep become the extra set of hands to bear the weight and ensure you don’t face the work alone.
When it clicks, it feels like fortune. Really, it’s the evidence of a different kind of strategy: choosing to allow others to hold the compass with you.
Not every table is created equal
This is not about forming a cheerleading squad.
If a community only ever makes you feel good or confirms what you’ve already decided, you’ve found yourself an echo chamber.
That’s not a community. It’s a comfort blanket with a group chat.
If you’re paying to be part of something that’s dripping with frameworks, tools, and answers that are too good to be true, that’s not a community either. It’s a club (or a cult).
Though you might get involved looking for genuine depth, the curriculum has been designed to respond to how you feel right now. It might feel like progress, but it’s nothing more than a sophisticated way to respond to surface tension. To treat the symptom, not the source.
Genuine community doesn’t have a curriculum for your discomfort. It sits in the question with you, without an agenda, until you can hear the Oboe’s A once again.
It’s where you’ll find fellowship and friction in equal measure. The warmth of being genuinely known, and the discomfort of being genuinely challenged.
You need both.
Anything else will keep you trained on someone else’s version of you.
Without it, you navigate entirely by an internal compass which, as we established in What Presence Requires, is all too easily bent by your biases and blindspots.
Fellowship is not a nice-to-have.
It’s the whole point.
Holding hope, together
There is one final thing that only community can provide.
Proof.
Sustaining belief by yourself is exhausting. You have to wake up each morning and convince yourself, again, that it’s worth it. That in the silence, the slow, unremarkable steps still matter.
It’s not realistic.
Even this morning I woke up in a hall of mirrors, each reflecting back to me someone experiencing what I perceived as a success I long for. This project loses me more subscribers than it gains. Few people share the work. Fewer still reach out to let me know it resonates.
In my isolation, that silence feels like a personal verdict.
And then I sit down with a member of the Order of Unremarkable Creators and something shifts. We hold creative energy for one another. But it’s more than that. It is the profound relief of being seen, heard, and known.
I hear about their quiet inbox. Their moments of panic. Their struggle to keep the faith.
Suddenly, the silence I woke up to is no longer a sign that I’m failing. It is just the reality of the terrain. Community doesn’t guarantee my success, but does provide the hard, undeniable evidence that I’m not crazy.
And I’m not alone.
And that changes everything about how I show up on any given day.
This is what my brother knew at that Christmas table. He didn’t offer those migrant workers a speech about how their circumstances would magically improve. He offered them evidence: you are not the only one who feels alone this Christmas. Everyone here understands. Pull up a chair.
The grip loosens because you are no longer holding it alone.
Can I get a witness?
You already know community matters. You’ve felt the difference it makes. That Christmas scene isn’t surprising to you: it resonates because you have your own version of it.
And yet most practitioners I meet are building alone. It sits on the list of things to get to when they’ve proven something, when there’s more time, when there’s more certainty.
It doesn’t just leave you unsupported. It changes what you’re serving.
Without witness, you stop serving the work and start serving your fear about the work. When I woke up this morning it knew exactly what it wanted, the safety of the established playbook: a new offer, a waiting list, a thousand direct messages. It even knows how to disguise itself as progress.
Without the people around me, fear fills the space and makes the decision for me. With them, I start to see what the work actually needs.
My friend recently reminded me that art is about where you put it.
A shape is just a shape until it repeats enough to become a pattern, is scaled large enough to alter a room, or is placed in a sequence to communicate an idea. Context doesn’t just frame the art. It determines whether the art can be seen at all, whether its meaning translates, and who gets to experience it.
So give yourself and your work a new context.
A space where your Majesty becomes visible: not just to others, but to yourself. Where fellowship witnesses you, friction sharpens you, and hope becomes evidence instead of wishful thinking.
Art is about where you put it.
So find yourself a table.
And pull up a chair.
An invitation
If you’re already in the work, building with intention, and hard work doesn’t scare you - I’d love to have a conversation.
The Order of Unremarkable Creators exists to offer the fellowship, friction, and context many artists, creators, and solo-operators are missing.
It’s not something you can simply join, and membership is currently capped at 20 members (this is not a tactic, it’s about foundations before growth).
If you’re curious to know more, or if this stanza has raised questions for you, please reach out to me on dan@unremarkable.co.
Where We Are:
This is Week 22 of a year-long practice.
Movement 2: Empathy - eight weeks exploring kindness and respect for self and the power genuine connection.
The Great Leveller ← You are here
Think Like an Artist
You Can’t See the View When You’re in the View
Click here to read the Overture and Movement 1.