One day last week while mindlessly scrolling through Facebook (something I try not to do frequently but occasionally find myself sucked into its vortex), an ad for a Kickstarter campaign caught my attention. If you’re not familiar with Kickstarter, it’s a crowdfunding platform designed to support creative projects. I enjoy exploring the varied projects that creatives and inventors are working to bring to life, so this ad slowed my scroll.
I’ll admit that I’m a sucker for a good bag so my curiosity about the messenger-type bag being promoted prompted me to click on the accompanying video. What I saw blew me away. Yes, the bag was interesting, but the purpose of the bag, called the “Con Bag of Holding,” is what really grabbed me.
If that name makes sense to you, then you deserve credit for being in tune with modern pop culture. I tried to deduce what the name meant. I have a vague notion that a con is a convention designed for fans of comic books and other expressions of popular trends. “Bag of Holding” sounds like it has a connection to the world of fantasy. Putting the two together, I reasoned that it’s a bag for comic book type convention goers. But I admit that I didn’t know enough to understand why anyone would want to take this particular bag to a con.
Then I watched the video. The bag has a display window for showing off pins, patches, keychains, and other things its owner has collected. I hadn’t realized how much those objects could matter. Although I have no interest in comic books or their related culture, watching the video gave me the odd feeling that I was missing out on something.
So, how did Rollacrit’s Con Bag of Holding Kickstarter campaign go? It reached its $50,000 goal in ten minutes of launching. With 16 days to go, it has raised $440,389 from 3,090 backers. Clearly, the bag has found its people.
I’m telling you all this because, if you’re like me, you probably don’t spend your time at cons. However, tons of other people do. In the United States alone, there are more than 1,000 comic cons hosted in convention centers every year drawing hundreds of thousands of people. Although not required, many attendees dress up as their favorite comic book or other pop-culture characters, referred to as cosplay. That means that they not only invest in a ticket to the event, hotels, and food but in the costumes and other paraphernalia such as the Con Bag of Holding and the pins and swag they display on it to feel like they belong.
And that’s the bottom line. It’s all about belonging. In a 2013 Eventbrite Survey, 65% of the respondents of Comic Con cited “meet new friends” as a major motivator for attending.
Where do you belong?
Where we belong—where we feel a sense of connection and feel comfortable cultivating meaningful connections—matters. Yet finding those connections isn’t always easy. In a 2025 survey conducted for the American Psychological Association, nearly seven in ten U.S. adults said they had needed more emotional support in the past year than they received. This study showed that half of Americans are distressed about division and feel lonely as a result.
We are social creatures and we need to be in community with one another. For thousands, even hundreds of thousands, maybe that’s finding friends by displaying pins and merit badges at a Comic-Con. For others, it might happen somewhere entirely different.
Last weekend, my wife, Wendy (who wrote her own essay about communities that you can read here: Here-and-Now Communities), and I joined about twenty-five people on a pontoon boat sponsored by the James River Association. We were hoping to witness a massive, dinosaur-like sturgeon breach the surface of the James. We stood like silent sentries, gazing at the water in anticipation of a sight few people ever get to see. We didn’t know one another, but when a sturgeon leapt out of the water, our shared gasps of awe connected us, if only for a few seconds. Even among strangers, we felt a sense of community because of our shared purpose and experience.
To see one of these beasts in action, check out this photo at Bill Draper Photography at facebook.com/billdraperphotography.
Earlier this month, Wendy and I drove to Maryland to join our tribe—women, mostly lesbians and queer women, at a volunteer-run women’s music festival—a festival that was founded fifty-one years ago. SisterSpace Weekend Women’s Festival offers a much-needed refuge, sanctuary, and community for women (including cisgender, transgender, and non-binary sisters) that’s hard to find in the straight-dominated world.
Wendy and I found connection at SisterSpace in our meeting with the incredible women from Herstory Lesbian Archives, an archive that “exists to gather, preserve and provide access to records of Lesbian lives and activities,” especially our communities. In a recorded oral history, we shared about the 150 people who attended our 2010 wedding, four years before same-sex marriage became legal in Virginia. Those people represented so many of the communities that have given us strength over the years, including friends, family, church, and work colleagues. Re-telling the story for Herstory reminded me of how blessed I’ve been to belong to so many communities.
Even within the SisterSpace community, more deliberate communities gather. Women of Color gather for connection, healing, and empowerment. A sexuality space offers women opportunities to explore their sensual and sexual selves. Drumming circles call women who honor the sacred heartbeat of the drum. Women in recovery found strength with each other. And I’m sure other communities gathered that we had no idea about.
This weekend, I’ll be attending the James River Writers (JRW) Conference, an annual gathering of writers who want to connect with each other and deepen their understanding of writing craft and publishing.
Writers often work alone, as I’m doing right now. We sit by ourselves and create whole worlds, complete with relationships and interactions. We imagine them in our minds, then let them flow through our fingers onto the keyboard, taking shape as words and sentences magically appear on the page. Then comes the even harder part: whether to risk letting someone else into the world we’ve created.
A writers’ community such as JRW and the community Wendy and I formed, the WordsWomen Literary Salon, helps me find the courage to emerge from that isolation and share both my work and myself with others. Connecting with other writers is essential to my process.
My faith community has also girded me through difficult and joy-filled times—the First Unitarian Universalist RVA for seventeen years and the wider Unitarian Universalist Association for over thirty. It’s here that I heal my broken spirit, center my moral compass, and celebrate when the arc of the universe bends toward justice.
Within our congregation, smaller communities connect people to their passions through quilting, environmental stewardship, sexuality education, anti-racism and justice work, writing, reading, guiding young children, making coffee, singing, and even playing the ukulele. In a community this large, people with an interest can generally find others to share it with—if they’re willing to take a risk and ask.
The connections I’ve described don’t all last forever. A gasp on the river may bring strangers together for seconds. A festival can offer a weekend of refuge. Writers and faith communities can sustain us for years. However long we engage with them, each gives us a chance to recognize something of ourselves in other people.
The importance of connecting
Maybe we all need a Bag of Holding to display our passions—paraphernalia to initiate conversations with others about them. For some, a car covered in bumper stickers serves this purpose. For others, it’s proclaiming their beliefs or things they love on a t-shirt. Sometimes the signal is less visible: signing up for a boat trip, walking into a conference, or asking whether anyone else wants to play the ukulele.
Still others have turned to social media to find connection. Unfortunately, a 2025 study by Baylor University found that “the very platforms designed to bring people together contribute to an “epidemic of loneliness.” Social media offers us a pseudo connection that makes us think we are part of a community. However, it rarely serves that purpose.
We need in-person connections. We need to see other humans face-to-face. We need to laugh with them, share moments of awe, cry together, create something that outlives us. We need each other.
As we head into the introspective time that fall and winter bring, maybe it’s worth considering the communities to which you belong. Do they nourish you? Do you feel restored or drained after engaging with them? What passions of yours are not being fed? Do you feel lonely? If so, what could you do to engage more with others who share your interests?
Take a quiet morning or evening to reflect and maybe even journal about these questions. As you head into 2027 imagine what your life could be like if you felt connected to others who made your life richer.
Maybe there’s even a Comic-Con in your future. And whether you’re likely to carry a Con Bag of Holding, the next time you see someone displaying what they love, maybe you could ask them about it. I’m going to make a point of doing just that.
Yours in peace, beauty, and community
Annette
References
American Psychological Association, “APA Poll Reveals a Nation Suffering From Stress of Societal Division, Loneliness”: https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2025/11/nation-suffering-division-loneliness
Baylor University, “Social Media’s Double-Edged Sword: Study Links Both Active and Passive Use to Rising Loneliness”: https://news.web.baylor.edu/news/story/2025/social-medias-double-edged-sword-study-links-both-active-and-passive-use-rising
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I knew Comic Cons were big but whoa, that Kickstarter being funded in 10 minutes is wild…who knew?! I love that you bring the essay around to the importance of community and the challenge it can be finding community. Good food for thought.
Posted too soon! I’ve now connected with a virus of some sort so I won’t be connecting with the public for a few days.