SPACE: Art, Mental Health, and Sustainable Practices

Fighting WITH Each Other: An antidote to the epidemic of disconnection

We often talk about the importance of having space: creating space, holding space, making space for rest, reflection, and ourselves. But what if another kind of space is equally consequential to our mental health? What if the space that emerges between people when we are in conflict, disagreement, or discomfort is actually a solution for society in a crisis of loneliness? Artists are uniquely positioned to bring awareness to this powerful space, by drawing our communities' attention to the importance and transformative magic of it, engaging our communities in dialog, and contemplative moments. In short, we have the ability to make fighting with each other “look sexy.”

In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General issued Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation [1], highlighting the significant health consequences of social disconnection. Social isolation and loneliness have been associated with depression, cardiovascular disease, dementia, and other serious health outcomes. At the same time, social anxiety, which is founded in the fear of rejection, contributes to withdrawal and avoidance, creating a feedback loop in which isolation makes connection increasingly difficult. If connection is essential to our wellbeing, what happens when the skills required to sustain connection through difficulty are underdeveloped?

For artists, these questions carry particular significance. Artistic practice often requires making the deeply personal public, inviting vulnerability, interpretation, and potential rejection. Yet this exposure also creates opportunities: artists can interrogate their own relationships to conflict and discomfort through their practice, while using their work to provoke, challenge prevailing assumptions, and create spaces for public dialogue and connection. How might art help us navigate the tensions between vulnerability and self-protection, difference and belonging, or disconnection and repair?

Dominant American culture often gives us considerable latitude to move away from relationships, communities, and social spaces when they become uncomfortable or conflictual. This capacity can be protective, particularly for people navigating marginalization, violence, or unsafe environments. But what is lost when separation becomes our primary strategy for managing relational tension? Alongside creating physical and emotional space for ourselves, we also need to develop greater capacity to remain present within the discomfort of difference.

Conflict is often framed as evidence that a relationship is failing. Yet conflict is also an inevitable feature of proximity, interdependence, and collective life. Living in a community home has made visible to me how much relational skill is required to remain connected when people’s needs, boundaries, identities, expectations, and capacities come into tension. Sustaining relationship does not mean eliminating conflict; it requires developing practices for communicating needs, negotiating boundaries, tolerating discomfort, repairing rupture, and remaining in relationship when resolution is neither immediate nor simple.

Addressing loneliness requires more than creating opportunities for people to gather. It also requires cultivating the relational capacity to stay connected when connection becomes difficult. What would it mean to understand conflict not as a threat to belonging, but as a site where deeper forms of intimacy, accountability, and collective resilience can develop? How might we create enough space within our relationships and artistic practices for difference, discomfort, boundaries, conflict, and repair without making separation our only pathway to relief?

If loneliness is, in part, the experience of disconnection, perhaps one way back to one another is not to eliminate conflict, but to become more skilled at moving through it together. What might become possible if we learned not only how to share joyous space, but how to fight with each other?