A letter to the version of you that couldn't take part in Pride

As with all holidays, Pride can be complicated

Is it just me, or is Pride month extra fraught this year? I know it certainly is for my trans friends who are not-so-jokingly saying things like, “Happy Pride, hope I don’t get eradicated” or my married lesbian friends who have made legal maneuvers to prepare for the possible overturn of Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court decision that legalized gay marriage nationwide in 2015.

The tenor of conversation this Pride month seems to have reached a new, panicked octave, and with good reason.

As the noise around me amplifies, I find myself getting quiet and going inward to participate in a different kind of conversation around Pride—mediating the competing internal voices around my own queer identity that have existed at different times throughout my life.

I am currently in Week 8 of my first attempt at doing “The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity,” a book/methodology by Julia Cameron that promises to unblock your inner creative force. When I embarked on my “Artist’s Way” journey, I expected to uncover and dissolve limiting beliefs about my own creative capacity that were holding me back from being the writer I want to be. But instead (or perhaps in addition) I have found myself on an unexpected path to uncovering the ways I still have not thoroughly unblocked my queerness a full 23 years after coming out to myself.

This week’s “Artist’s Way” lesson is “Recovering a Sense of Strength.” It is a timely exercise for me in a cultural moment when it’s tempting to retreat into my old ways of embracing a straight-passing existence that kept me safe in other times that felt dangerous for openly queer people.

I share a little bit about how I discovered I was not straight in this video, but the short version is that my friendship with an openly gay man in college began to undo the homophobic programming I received in the Baptist church growing up. Witnessing him live as his authentic self gave me permission to uncover parts of myself it didn’t feel safe to know before.

Yesterday I read these words in “The Artist’s Way”:

In order to move through loss and beyond it, we must acknowledge it and share it. Because artistic losses are seldom openly acknowledged or mourned, they become artistic scar tissue that blocks artistic growth.

Julia Cameron is talking about “unsuccessful” works of art that we’ve put out into the world (a rejected poem, a failed screenplay). But when I replaced “artistic losses” with “lost pieces of ourselves,” I realized that the truth she was speaking applied to my relationship with my queerness.

So if I were to rewrite her words, I’d say: “Because lost pieces of ourselves are seldom openly acknowledged or mourned, they become psychic scar tissue that blocks our soul’s growth.”

(Which is not actually that different from her original words, as our art is one of the purest ways our soul communicates.)

“The Artist’s Way” process involves three pages of journaling every day called “Morning Pages” where you just write for three pages whatever comes to your mind. It’s meant to unburden you of the stuff that’s crowding your creative channels from flowing freely.

This morning’s journal pages included this quote from Julia Cameron: “The unmourned disappointment becomes the barrier that separates us from future dreams.”

This morning when I sat down with my mechanical pencil, I realized that I had never mourned the version of myself that did not have access to her queerness.

The version of myself that did not realize until many years later the feelings she’d had for a high school classmate.
The version of myself that did not get too deep into a relationship with a woman in my 20s because a life together did not seem possible for us.
The version of myself that stayed quiet when someone close to me saw two men holding hands and said “ugh, disgusting.”
The version of myself that was very good at following rules that did not actually suit me.

So I used today’s Morning Pages to write a letter to that version of myself, the one who had to cut off pieces of herself to fit in.

I’m sharing what I wrote here in case it inspires you to write your own letter to the pieces of yourself you were not allowed to know. Perhaps even now there are pieces of you that feel out of reach. Write to them. Begin to become whole.

Dear young Becky,

I’m so sorry the world denied you full access to yourself. All the parts of you are beautiful. You did a good job of following the rules and that was what you needed to do to keep you safe and in belonging. You did a really good job and it is not your fault that you were not allowed to fully know yourself.

But it is sad. It is okay to be really, really sad about all the years you were separated from an important part of yourself.

That part of you understood the whole time.

The queer part of you is the free-est part of you and she was always there, dormant until you could show her the daylight.

Now it is safe to give her all the sunlight and water and nourishment that she needs. She will blossom. She will take up all the space she is meant to.

She is splendid, she is resplendent, she is generous, she is overflowing with joy, she is free free free free free and she can’t wait to liberate everyone she meets.

America has never yet been about freedom.
But WE can be about freedom.
We can be about color and lushness and a knowing that can’t be found in any document or text. A knowing that exists outside of language because it was there even when you didn’t have words for it.
You felt it, a tiny seed.

It is safe to water the seed—yours and others’.

Love,
Future Becky