Mental Health Awareness Week – On Community, an extract
Posted on May 1, 2025
This year, Mental Health Awareness Week will take place from the 12 to 18 May 2025.
The theme for 2025 is ‘Community’, celebrating the power and importance of community. Being part of a safe, positive community is vital for our mental health and wellbeing. We thrive when we have strong connections with other people and supportive communities that remind us, we are not alone.
Included in our In the Moment series there is a book that could have been written expressly for this yearβs Mental Health Awareness Week: On CommunityΒ by Casey Plett and you can read an extract below.
Extract from On Community by Casey Plett
A Small Working List of Synonyms for Community
Population
Village
Neighbourhood
Scene
Fellowship
Kinship
Town
Block
Circle
Clique
Society
Nation
World
Gang
Public
Culture
Subculture
District
People
A Few People I Am Aware Of
Assumptions (3)
For a few years, I worked as a book publicist for Biblioasis, a small independent literary press and the publishers of this very essay. This was also in Windsorβa Rust Belt town of a quarter million nestled in the southern crook of Canada, across the border from Detroit.
One day at the office, in the late afternoon, I got a text from a girl Iβd met in Iowa through a couple I was friends with. They had given her my number. The girl said she was in Windsor and she was stranded. Sheβd been on a bus to Toronto but had trouble at customs, and the bus left by the time they let her through. She had no place to go. Could she … ?
βYes, of course you can crash!β I said. I gave my three housemates a heads-up, and they all confirmed: yes, of course she could crash. She bused over before I was off work. My housemates, who did not know her, let her in. They showed her the spare room. I drove home and we all hung out and drank red wine and talked till late. And she slept the night in our house and took off again on the bus to Toronto the next day.
None of this was fraught or difficult, it was all instantly convivial. She was already chatting warmly with my housemates when I walked in. Even I barely knew her, we had met only once in Iowa, and it was in a social atmosphere and not for that long. But this still all happened calmly, without question.
Every one of the seven people involved in the above story is a transsexual. We all made assumptions and they were the correct ones.
The next day at work, after the girl left, I wondered about my cis co-workers. How translatable my experience might be to them, how they might find themselves in similar scenarios, and how they might not. I kept thinking about it. My co-workers were considerate, generous people, the kind who would absolutely put up a friend of a friend in need. But I did feel a separation between me and them. I felt it.
Years later, looking back, Iβm not sure why I did. After all, itβs a pretty common experience to put up your friends travelling through town. Particularly in communal living situations, one might find oneself playing host to a stranger, as my housemates did. Thereβs nothing uniquely trans about that. Further, all seven people in the above story are a bunch of other things: all white, all went to college for at least a bit, all artsy weirdos who can bond about artsy weirdo stuff.
Did transness really lubricate this interaction of putting up my friend? I do think so, yes. Was the separation I felt between my co-workers and me that morning a good thing? Probably not, but I felt it. I wonder a lot about the presence/absence of friction in these kinds of situations, what lubricates help and hospitality, and what doesnβt.
***
You canβt take buses from Windsor to Toronto anymore, though. Not as Iβm writing this, anyway, in the spring of 2022. Greyhound shut down across all of Canada. It was a long time coming; the routes out west from my childhood that connected our communities have all been closed for years.
When I was a kid, the bus is how I travelled to Winnipeg to see my dad on weekends. My mom was regularly busy at work and my dad didnβt have a car. Recently, I asked my cousin how people get there and back if they donβt have wheels. She said everyone does rideshares. Part of me was charmed by that. Part of me was a bit sad. It is kind of nice to see an organic community response to fill such an essential service; itβs reminiscent of something like cork bulletin boards in cafΓ©s and grocery stores as a way to anonymously trade availability and need. And also, well, thereβs a lot of people out there who used the bus in those rural area β seniors without cars, members of remote Indigenous communities, women fleeing bad domestic situations, people who didnβt have money but maybe had time, people who were all those things at once. Seems an unbenevolent rupture to be at the mercy of whoever happens to be doing a rideshare that weekend.
For my mother, if she was in the same situation now as she was back then, I doubt she couldβve located trusted, dependable humans with whom to send out her seven-year-old kid on Manitoba winter highways. Though perhaps thatβs unfair. Maybe we wouldβve adjusted and found a way. Maybe.
On Community does crucial work in pushing harder on words and ideas we take for granted. It invites us to be more careful and intentional with our language, to consider how we relate to those we know β and to those we donβt know at all.
On Community by Casey Plett is available now!
Casey Plett is the author of A Dream of a Woman, Little Fish, A Safe Girl to Love, the co-editor of Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy From Transgender Writers, and the Publisher at LittlePuss Press. She has written for The New York Times, Harperβs Bazaar, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, McSweeneyβs Internet Tendency, the Winnipeg Free Press, and other publications. A winner of the Amazon First Novel Award, the Firecracker Award for Fiction, and a two-time winner of the Lambda Literary Award, her work has also been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.
