A Note on Belonging

the thing I searched for is still out of reach

Rage & Softness is reader-supported! Thank you to the folks who pay monthly to support my work. If you want to upgrade to paid, go here.

• If you would like to pay for a subscription, but don’t want to do so through Substack, you can pay via my Venmo or PayPal. Also, if you’d like a paid subscription, but can’t afford it, please email me and I’ll add you—no questions asked.

by

My book is a week old today and I still don’t feel like I belong anywhere.

The book is about that: a sense of belonging in online and offline spaces. I sort of come to terms with it at the end of the book. I sort of realize that I do belong in certain spaces, but I what I don’t discuss as much is that I sometimes wish I belonged everywhere, as absurd as that may sound.

Nobody can belong everywhere. Some people will just not like you and there isn’t anything you can do about it. Being liked and feeling a sense of belonging are not quite the same, but they feel like sisters to me.

I realize that I often dislike someone first before they can dislike me. It’s clearly a protective measure I learned as a kid. I also realize that I have often disliked people out of jealousy. I’m reminded of the quote by Hermann Hesse:

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.

I don’t feel like I belong with the cool anarchist/marxist feminists, or the sex workers, or the disabled folks—even if I share these identities. At 39-years-old, I still feel like that teenage child who abruptly lost the friends she prayed so hard to have. I still feel like most people do not like me. I still wish I didn’t care as much as I do.

I think some people see my Instagram following (227K) and assume I belong or assume I wouldn’t care if I didn’t. It’s an odd experience to have a following and feel a sort of nothingness. The reality is that I don’t have relationships with that many people. Mostly that works for me, but sometimes I wish I had more friends, more comrades, more deep soul connections with people who cared as much for me as I do them. But it’s oh so difficult for me to be social.

It’s also difficult because I just do not trust most people. I do not trust many people’s intentions with me. There have been too many friends or almost-friends who used me and threw me away when they were done. There have been too many instances of sharing my secrets only to hear or see them repeated elsewhere. There have been too many times where I twisted myself into something or someone I’m not. There has been too much pain at the ending of things.

I’m grateful to not be “normal,” and yet, I know my life would be easier if I was. Making peace with this is something I might always need to consciously work on. Feeling a sense of belonging with others might only come to me in brief moments—and I need to learn how to be okay with that.

1. Disabled students face rights violations in the fallout from Department of Education shutdown, advocates warn - Reina Sultan (I got to share my 2 cents regarding this topic, which is near and dear to me)

2. Cybersecurity Professor Mysteriously Disappears as FBI Raids His Homes - Dan Goodin

3. Who Can Referee Gender? - Emily Janakiram & Megan Lessard

4. Silence is Collaboration: Academics Must Speak Out Against Fascism - The Professors of Stockton University

5. Autism’s missing women - Gina Rippon

6. 'I Want to Make You Immortal:' How One Woman Confronted Her Deepfakes Harasser - Samantha Cole

7. The Fight For Fertility Equity Starts With Black Birth Workers - Brianna Nargiso

8. Bread Lines, Empty Shelves, Bombed Farms — This Is How Starvation Feels in Gaza - Shahad Ali

9. Higher education is over-complying with White House DEI bans, say educators - Maggie Yan

10. this song: