So last night I almost didn’t go to a local Seattle meetup put together by Holly and Jill from Feministe because I was sure being a man, and twice (almost) everybody’s age, and not having a graduate degree in anything, and not really being connected with a lot of people, and, and, and… and I was talking with my partner about it and mentioned that it always seemed like my story is that I don’t quite belong here, or that I won’t quite fit in there… and she said “well, all the more reason to go then.”

And anyway, so I went, right? And the first thing someone else said was “I was so nervous I almost didn’t come,” and then a bunch of other people nodded, and I said hey me too, and then suddenly we all had something in common after all.

And at least two things came to mind over that. First of all I don’t know if we ourselves are always the best judges of where we do and don’t fit in. Second, I sort of hate to think of all the other people who, for whatever reason, went the other way and didn’t show up because they made the decision they wouldn’t fit in.

The point being that for all of us there are probably some dimensions that we really really don’t fit into, but the chances that nobody will take us are so slim that, past a certain point, we have to start asking who’s really keeping us out.

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It felt really good to meet Jill and Holly. Feministe was maybe the second or third feminist blog I ran across when I first started reading blogs nearly three years ago now, and between that and Pandagon and Feministing (the other feminist blogs I found first), especially, I finally kicked myself out of the rut I’d been in since maybe the mid-1980s. So that was great, and it was great to be able to put faces to at least some of the names of their commenters too.