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I define a tribe as those people you rely on for your survival, delectation, AND companionship. They’re your peeps. You can name them!

[Excerpt from a footnote in my archives, 2019]

I refer to those people who know you peed the bed until you were 12, not because you told them but because they slept on the bottom bunk. They’re the ones who know you ate dog poo on a dare, and who know that you read yourself to sleep every night with a selection from your 300+ Harlequin Romances (and that you’ve memorized most of the dialogue because you quote from them incessantly). These are people hold your hair out of your face when you puke after downing too many shooters — and mock you for it for years thereafter. But they’ll punch anyone else who mocks you in the throat (metaphorically or literally). They’ll sit the night with you in the intensive care waiting room when your spouse is in a coma, sell their meagre assets to be beside you in a crisis, tell you when to slow down because stress is aging you, curl your hair at your wedding, buy the loudest, most annoying toy possible for your child, and will both marvel at and tease you for the thousands of baby pictures you subject them to. When you die, a part of them dies with you. It is these, and only these, people, who, with all their faults and follies, love you in spite of you and you them — when I speak of one’s tribe, I mean no other.

Afternote, March 11, 2025:

I dislike the rhetorical use of “tribe” and its derivatives. Like “tribal”. The rhetorical use of tribe (and tribal) is too broadly and carelessly applied, loaded with negative connotations, and too often deployed in ad hominen attacks.