Yes, You Are Queer Enough: Managing Self Doubt This Pride
Author: Tali Dolsten-Kuhel, LMSW
As we enter the month of June, it’s meaningful to pause and acknowledge Pride Month. Pride is a time to celebrate the LGBTQIA+ community’s resilience, acknowledge barriers to equality we face, and motivate change. On the individual level, Pride can offer an opportunity for reflection and self-acceptance.
For the individual experience of Pride, many people can feel torn between the actual experiences they have around sexuality and gender, and the outward ideals of what “Pride” should look like. The complexity here is that LGBTQIA+ people span generations, regions, ethnicities, races, religions and value systems. It’s hard to say what the quintessential queer person looks like or is like, because our community is just so vast. There are many stereotypes about LGBTQIA+ people that not all of us relate to, because stereotypes can never capture all of us in our complexity.
Perhaps you’re questioning your identity and not sure you’re ready to come out yet, or at all, to protect your safety. Or, you feel queer people need to immediately come out and become activists considering our challenges, but you’re not sure if you’re ready to be vocal about your identity. Or you may be a bisexual person who is partnered with someone of the opposite gender who may feel both excluded by LGBTQIA+ and straight spaces alike. Or you’re a nonbinary person who feels they don’t bend gender in the way they dress like they’re “supposed to.” Or an introverted asexual person who hates big events and prefers to stay home with a friend, a pet or a good book during pride. Maybe some aspect of each of these examples resonate with you, or maybe none at all!
As a minority group, queer people experience the unspoken pressure to always be in reference to the limited visible examples of who we are in order to explain ourselves. This pressure is a form of minority stress, a stress one feels when one is a member of a minority group. To always represent that group to the majority, and in turn, to diminish the unique parts of yourself that don’t fit the commonly understood mold of your minority group, because your unique experiences feel too complex to explain.
But here’s the thing. If you’ve come to identify with any aspect of the LGBTQIA+ community or experience, that is for you alone to hold. There is nothing you need to do, no outfit you need to wear, no grand social media proclamation you need to make. You and your unique experiences and interpretation of your identity are yours alone to define. Allow Pride to be a reminder that embracing your whole self and accepting who you’re attracted to, or not attracted to, and how you experience gender, or don’t experience gender, is enough. You deserve to have peace with your own experience and that process of acceptance is sacred and personal.
You may also feel pressured to experience only positive emotions during Pride, but this time may stir up feelings of grief, sadness, anxiety, loneliness, or other emotions. It’s important to acknowledge that all emotions are valid during Pride and beyond. Awareness and acceptance of the full spectrum of emotions is something we can cultivate through mindfulness. If you decide to seek professional help, our team at A Good Place Therapy is proud to have an explicit commitment to LGBTQ+ Affirming Therapy. You deserve a safe and affirming space to heal and grow.
Ironically, as life sometimes is, this feeling of not belonging in a space you feel you “should” belong in is very common. And, as you come into your own, you may choose to share your experience with others. Who knows? In doing so, you may make your own mark on our prism of shared LGBTQIA+ experiences and expand the outward expression of queer identity.
No matter how you choose to celebrate Pride this year, I hope you remember that your version of LGBTQIA+ experience is enough. And you are not alone.