belonging: the struggle to feel accepted.

last tuesday night i had a bit of a confrontation with a mormon friend over a feminist blogpost i had shared. he essentially dismissed this post as irrational and infantile.  and i got angry and told him off.

the next day, i was in a bit of a funk.  i wasn't exactly sure why.  but when i started thinking about it i realized it had started the night before with this confrontation.  which i initially found strange.  i know this man to be very different from me when it comes to political and social beliefs (think of a young glen beck).  and i know better than to take him seriously.  but he got under my skin and not just in an easily dismissed way.

you see, i struggle with feeling accepted by my community, specifically my mormon community.  not with the fact that my community thinks differently than i do, but with the fact that that community seems to disallow even being what and who i am.  there's this refusal to even engage on the level of ideas.  not with every member of the community, but certainly with most of them.  they hear what i say and dismiss it.  and that's precisely what this man did.  he offered no thoughtful criticism; he provided no counter-argument or rebuttal; he simply, and condescendingly, dismissed what i had presented as a thoughtful and provocative analysis of women's place in the church.  and it hurt.  deeply.

i can't help but wonder if other members of my community, the ones who smile and nod but shift awkwardly when talking with me, whether they too feel the way this man did but are just too nice to say something about it.  i can't help but feel rejected by my own people.  because with all my reservations and concerns and anger and frustration, i am mormon before i am almost anything else.  and i don't know how to divorce myself enough that it doesn't hurt to be rejected so glibly, as if my ideas and i are nothing more than an annoyance to be swatted away.