This will be emotional, I'm sorry.
I've never "fit in". I have Asperger's, and since I was three, I knew that I was different. Kids ignored me. I never could say the right thing. I was always invested in one thing, and my peers went off and did a bajillion things at a time. In Kindergarten, kids excluded me. I could never follow directions because I didn't understand them, and teachers were pretty fed up with the dumb little girl who takes everything literally.
By first grade, I was the outcast. I couldn't make friends, and you know kids, they never hesitated to let me know how much they hated me. Throughout Elementary, I did have friends on and off, but they mostly kept their distance and broke it off after a year.
Middle school and again I had no friends, was constantly ridiculed by staff and student, and was severely depressed. By seventh grade, I was displaying signs of bipolar disorder, and I was pulled out of school twice the following year. Then, it got too much for the alumni, so they sent me to an alternative program, where kids never saw me as desirable and classes were last-rate. I started high school there, and had only one friend, who was highly manipulative and dishonest. I couldn't do sports, clubs, or a theater group. I was moved to a class in a more mainstream school where the kids seemed to think they had to be "mean girls" , as though they were eleven instead of fifteen. I was generally despised.
I came back to my home district. It's been better, but I still haven't had a chance to connect with my grade, grow in a club, or do a sport. I am tolerated, kids are kind, but I never "belong". Some kids still seem to think it's acceptable to mock me behind my back, so I'm on my toes. It sounds dumb, but compared to them, I feel like I've missed my chance at being a teenager.
What does this have to do with UU?
Religiously, UUism dictates that all beliefs are equal, but also states that every human being is equal one another as well. I was born UU. In my church, I experienced people so willing to accept me that I didn't have to try for them. They wanted me, and they wanted me to be me. Even in my own home, I have not been as unconditionally supported. I had kind of known the kids in my youth group, and I started going again after about five years. I genuinely felt at ease, and it was easy to socialize with them. Of course they weren't goody two shoes kids, but they accepted me, for all my quirks.
We took a trip to Boston to learn about our heritage. There, we had fun and talked and laughed and lived. We were messing around on swings at night when I realized: I felt like a teenager. I felt like how I thought kids my age did. And I felt like I belonged.
My minister is the kindest woman, and I adore her. She is endlessly supportive and knowledgeable. I was never a "church girl", but now I sure am! I try to go every Sunday, and youth group is sooo important to me, too.
So, in the end, one can follow their own independent spirituality, but that will not necessarily teach them acceptance, nor will they find it with other atheists. The culture that unconditional tolerance and diversity creates extends past a religious context. It branches out to shelter someone like me, a depressed, bipolar, autistic teen outcast who thought she would never find friendship.
It is so much more than a "new age cult". It is a way of life, a way of thinking, and above all, a community.
In my experience, anyway.
