Acceptance

Over the past few weeks I’ve been tweeting and posting to Facebook about a Kickstarter campaign that I’ve backed, trying to drum up more support.

The campaign was organised by the people behind Irreverent Dance, the aim was to raise funds for Europe’s first dedicated, gender neutral, fully accessible, dance space for London’s LGBTQ community.

I was so so happy when they achieved funding and, with the deadline now passed, managed to raise even more (goal was £30k, final total was £36,388).

I’ll now fess up and admit I know the organiser but that’s not why I backed the project.

I also didn’t back this project because I care about dance (if you’ve seen me ‘dance’ you’ll know why…).

And I definitely didn’t back this project because it is based in London; although here’s hoping that with a permanent base there could be some form of franchise model in the future? I know many people in Glasgow who would welcome something like this north of the border.

No, those aren’t the reasons I backed the campaign. The reason was a simple one.

Acceptance.

Reading through some of the back stories of the campaign, and the aims of Irreverent Dance, I realised I was finding a lot of parallels.

I’ve written in the past about not really fitting in and that general sense pervades today. No matter what ‘scene’ or ‘community’ I find myself in, I always feel a bit outside of it. Most likely because I don’t fully commit – I like my life to have a mix of things – but even then it’s not always the nicest set of feelings.

Even back at school I didn’t really fit in, stuck between the ‘not quite as popular as the really popular kids’ group and the ‘top grades all the time, bloody swots’ group.

Back then it was hard to deal with but these days it’s not something that bothers me, I accept it’s who I am, but I’ve not always had that accepted by others, so seeing what Irreverent Dance do just makes me happy knowing that there are small pockets of the world where all that really matters is acceptance.

“Be who you want to be!”

A very easy thing to say, a lot harder to do if you don’t feel like you fit in anywhere.

So, bravo to everyone who contributed! I hope everyone who will benefit from this new dance space finds it a little easier to accept themselves, and more able to ignore those people who don’t.


 

Update: The wrong question to ask yourself about crowd funding – matches my basic reasoning for supporting the Irreverent Dance campaign.