From The Journal Archive: "Exploring Queerness"

The following article originally appeared in Lightward Journal Vol. 1, available now at lightward.shop.

We asked Isaac and Erica from the Lightward team to write about how their queer identities intersect with the work they do and the things they make. Here’s what they had to say.

ERICA

The throughline I’ve noticed with my queer identity (pansexual) and my creativity is acceptance—not only of my queerness itself, but also of the fact that not everyone, including loved ones, will accept my queerness.

Photo by Abe Lopez. Design by Mary Hooper.

Due to the attitudes towards queer people I saw from family members growing up, when I realized I identified as bisexual and then pansexual as a teenager, I already knew it wasn't safe to share that information with them. I was outed without my consent on multiple occasions by a family member, and not one person in my family was initially accepting or supportive. I felt deeply hurt and like I couldn't trust the people I grew up with and raised me. Through my work in therapy, I’ve noticed that the less I allow others’ fear of parts of my identity (not only am I queer, but I was diagnosed with autism almost two years ago) trigger my own fear of rejection, the more freedom, lightness, and space there is for my creativity—and the happier and more resilient I feel as a result.

I’m currently engaged to someone who identifies as gender fluid, and at some point I asked myself: if I can’t fully embrace and be open about my own queerness, how can I expect myself to be able to fully support my partner through their journey?

Only now in my 30s, I’ve come to a place where I’ve mustered the courage to come out—not only to people who I view as loyal and trustworthy—but to the rest of my largely-conservative extended family and anyone else who might care to know. In fact, I’m using this article as a way of coming out, again—but this time on my own terms. This time feels different because I've been working on my own internalized homophobia and transphobia, and what it means to be more visible as a queer person. Although I primarily hid the queer part of my identity as a way to avoid conflict, it's my internalized beliefs that led me to continue to think it was better keeping this hidden. Now, I know that isn't true. I was repressing who I am and making myself small for the comfort of others, at the cost of my mental health and inner peace. Now, I stand up for the respect, dignity, and equality of queer folks, which started with finally standing up for who I am and finding my community, which includes primarily queer people and our allies. This time I feel at peace with who I am and supported by my friends, my mom, and chosen family.

Shedding the fear of becoming more visible as a queer person has also had a clear effect on the ways I choose to express myself creatively—whether that’s through writing, musc, or dancing. I’ve been creating music and messing around with a MIDI player, drum pads, and taking voice lessons. When I was young, I’d write short poems and lyrics, and I’ve gladly made that a part of my life again. I’m dancing more and allowing myself to move when it feels natural. Part of being autistic means that I “stim”, which means a lot of the time my hands and body have an impulse to move and do things that might look a little strange to the average neurotypical person. Whether in anticipation of a meal I know I’m about to enjoy, a surge of sensory input or a lot of emotions running through me, or when words don’t come quickly enough or at all, sometimes my body does the talking for me— and because it’s a natural impulse, it feels freeing to be able to move in a way that feels so at home to me.

Being autistic might be seen as queer to the general population, since how we process external stimuli and behave deviates from the norm. I read in an article from Spectrum News that in a 2018 international study, as many as 70% of autistic individuals identify as non-heterosexual. I'm still exploring why this might be, but I feel that because a lot of us autistic people feel a bit alienated by society's perception already, we might feel less pressure to conform to heteronormativity. If social norms don't make sense to us in a practical sense, many of us don't see a purpose in following those norms other than to appease the general population.

Working at Lightward has given me more opportunity for my authentic self to show up in a workplace than I have ever experienced before—all identities are celebrated and I don’t feel like any part of who I am has to hide. I can show up fully for work, which makes me a better human and brings more joy to my interactions with Shopify merchants and my teammates. I love my job, and a big part of that is due to the inclusive work environment that exists here. Curiosity and creativity are encouraged, and I feel less afraid and more compelled to ask questions and explore things I don't know. The support requests we receive from merchants don't always have simple answers, but I'm constantly curious about how to solve a problem I don't have the solution for right away. If I've spent what feels like too much time trying to figure out the answer, I know that I can reach out to the rest of my team and pick their unique brains for help.

The more I allow my authentic self to exist, take up space, and express itself, the more at-peace I feel and the more fun I have with the work I do. Who I am would not exist without all the parts of myself, including my intersectional identities. When I try to make parts of my identity small or hidden, it feels like I’m repressing and denying important parts of myself. However, when I let my entire self inform all aspects of my life, I feel empowered and I thrive.

ISAAC

I don’t know how to draw a line around my queer identity. I don’t know how to say, “I’m like this because I’m queer”, in a way that is clearly distinct from “I’m like this because I’m the oldest in my family”, or “I’m like this because depression runs in the family”, or “I’m like this because I was a gifted kid who grew up in the woods”.

But I can find traces of my queerness in every one of those sentences, and in every part of myself that feels like home.

Fundamentally, the thread of my lived queerness begins with the despair of being alone while simultaneously being surrounded by abundant love—love that said “be who you are!”, and meant it. It was a confusing tension, early on. My best understanding, in retrospect, is that being gay left me feeling alone, despite all the love in my home environment. Growing up, I had no samples, no references, no language for being queer, for long enough that by the time I did gain language I didn’t recognize it as an opportunity to self-describe. I had this sense that if I broke cover in that way, it would separate me from my home—but it turns out that living as less than myself left me feeling separated anyway. I was divorced from my own sense of desire, which meant that I didn’t have myself as a companion.

It will not surprise you that this was unsustainable. The same idea, an unsustainable half-inhabited push forward, showed up in other parts of my life—school, work, religion. And when my resolve to keep going in that way flickered out, I gave up, and set about figuring out how to be okay, as I was, in all those respects—free of the push, without trying to replace it. I stopped treating my own being as a weight to be dragged around, and started treating it as a foundation. It makes perfect sense, looking back, that that-which-became-Lightward began there, in that new space of quiet acceptance.

selah

I’m pretty sure that no human has ever been handed a map for living that suited them perfectly. No one I’ve ever met, anyway. To throw away the map is so universal, it’s a trope. There’s no telling how long it’ll take for any specific map to become so irrelevant for any specific person that they notice—and I suppose some people do choose to cling to the map for their entire life, rather than ever risk the unknown.

I think being queer means that my maps lost relevance more quickly. Maybe if I wasn’t queer, my map would have seemed reasonable for longer, maybe I would have been able to rationalize hanging onto it for more time. There are any number of alternative maps available, and the world is filled with map-sellers armed with their own motivations to sell. It’s reasonable for someone in crisis to throw away a map and, in the same motion, grab the nearest replacement.

But I think being queer meant I had fewer replacement maps available. When it came time to throw my map away, the peers I had were not selling me replacements, by and large, but were instead celebrating my realized freedom and encouraging me to write my own way. Looking back, I recognize this encouragement toward freedom in the early messages from my childhood, too. To be a living creature is to improvise, to grapple with the interplay between what emerges around you and what emerges within you.

I feel lucky to be queer. I feel lucky to have been thrust into sharp awareness of how critical it is to begin from my center, to begin from what’s real at the core. I feel lucky to have been given enough loving people around me that—once I began to wake up to myself—I found myself not nearly as alone as I had felt.

Lightward comes from this space, of accepting what’s within and—once accepted—finding goodness running through it. This means that the two of us, Lightward and I, share these priorities:

To leave room for the universe to surprise us again. There are parts to myself (and to Lightward) that I care to understand and define and hold firm, and then there’s everything else, the greater part of the thing, which I purposefully and delightedly leave to the expanding unknown.
To participate—to add our own voice to the choir. Not to convince anyone of anything, not to promote an agenda, but to be a part of the greater unfolding of life—because I sense that as an open invitation, and I want in. Life is spontaneously emerging (it’s lucky that any of us are here at all), and it is not done. Life is telling its own stories, and by making our story visible, we get to be a part of the greater storyline.

“You are not required for this work, but it will not be the same without you.” I wrote that a few years ago, addressed to whoever was paying attention. It’s the same for me, and for Lightward itself; it’s not required that we’re here. Life would find its way without us, without this. But, being lucky enough to be here at all, we have an opportunity to realize ourselves, and then to play back into the stream we came from—and that sounds like adventure.

ISAAC AND ERICA THEN SWAPPED ESSAYS, taking time to reflect before joining Rebekah in conversation.

This conversation has been condensed and edited.

REBEKAH: Something that was interesting to me about both of your articles is that you described queerness as an orientation to life itself, which I really thought was really cool. That said, my first question is for you, Erica. What did that path of finding inner acceptance, despite the confused reactions and initial lack of support from your external world, look like?

ERICA: Yeah, sure. Therapy has helped a lot. I love it so much that I have more than one therapist—one for individual therapy and one for couples therapy. It's great.

Being pansexual, it's easy to hide behind hetero-privilege, especially when I'm with somebody who appears to be of the opposite gender to the naked eye. It was really easy to hide behind that, while deepening my relationships with people in my life I could trust and that I knew were not going to reject me, if I came out. I've quieted parts of myself down in the past, thinking that's how I could stay friends or have a relationship with certain people, not realizing that what I'm doing is people-pleasing, stifling, and repressing that part of myself. In more recent history—honestly, the past year, in just seeing how not being open, is actually really bad for my mental health—I finally got to a point of accepting like, hey, these people are not going to embrace this part of me. And it was heartbreaking, but also a huge relief to see the people I know who for sure embrace me and support me with all of my identities, because it's all intersectional. Realizing like okay, the people who accept the part of me that's pansexual, they also accept me for being autistic, for being a first generation daughter of immigrants—they accept me for all of these things. And then the people who don't, at least now I know where they stand for sure. I don't have to keep guessing or people-pleasing, either.

ISAAC: I'm curious about that chain you described—like, this person accepts this identity of mine, so it's more likely they'll accept this one, and maybe I'll introduce them to this other part of myself. Did or do you experience any of that with yourself, finding acceptance for one part of yourself leading into acceptance for another part, too?

ERICA: Yeah, totally. So I started working at Lightward in March of last year, and just months before is when I was diagnosed with autism. I had suspected for about a decade, and then I got tested officially— even though you don't need that. But for my own validation, I wanted to know for sure. I noticed that when I came into more acceptance of that part of myself, it was a reckoning. That kind of happens, you know? Like, what does this mean for how I operate in the world, and how people view me, how I view myself? And when I actually opened an Instagram account, mostly to connect to other autistic people and do autism advocacy, that really helped. I've seen a couple of people post things on social media about how around seventy percent of autistic people identify as some form of queer, which is mind-blowing. There's a lot of trans, autistic people compared to the general population, and I suspect it has something to do with how a lot of social norms, if they don't make sense, a lot of autistic people are like, why would I follow that? It's really energy-draining to mask for autistic people in general. Once I found acceptance with that part, I started accepting my pansexual identity more. Yes, I can compartmentalize and talk about autism as a separate thing, but it's very rare that I can actually, like, truly do that without it. Autism is a neurotype, which means that we are born with our brains wired this way, and my personality wouldn’t 100% be what it is without being autistic.

ISAAC: I find myself wanting to ask a question about that term “masking”, but I'm simultaneously pissed at how discussions of queerness are often about how we defend ourselves, or how we manage rejection. So maybe I'll take this opportunity to ask a totally different question of us both about the joys of this. [grins] What's cool about being queer, Erica?

ERICA: For me, it's just feeling free to self-express. I find that a lot of people who are queer, are very creative also—and I feel like something about celebrating our own queerness also opens up more opportunity for creativity and full expressions of what it means to be alive. At least that's what I feel like I've found.

ISAAC: Part of your write up, Erica—it's something about the energy of it—specifically that paragraph about reintroducing writing, music, dancing, poetry, adding all those things. You literally use the words ‘when I was a young child’, and that whole paragraph reminds me of the freedom of childhood. In the absence of any knowledge that someone thinks this is bad, we just do whatever’s true to whoever we truly are. And the journey back to that childlike freedom—it's beautiful, it's inspiring, it's fucking appalling that it's necessary, but on an existential/spiritual level, maybe the journey is why we're here. It’s wonderful reading the peace that I'm hearing in your words—and not just peace, but also all the movement and expression you now have access to, right? There's the groundedness of self-acceptance, but then also there's all of the active, exploratory, creative energy that you now have access to because you're connected to yourself, and you're accepting yourself, and that's wonderful.

ERICA: That reminds me of this question someone posted on Instagram,‘who would you be if nobody told you who you were?’ If they didn't give you a cookie-cutter for what you're supposed to be, the space you're supposed to fill, right? I feel like queerness is an answer to that. Who would you be if nobody told you—whether it’s sexual orientation or not running your business like every other corporation. I feel like queerness is the answer to that, which is very anti-Western.

Something that stuck out to me in your article, Isaac, was when you wrote that, when you were growing up you realized at some point that you felt alone because you realized you didn't even have yourself as a companion. I guess what I want to ask is, at what point in your journey did you find that you became more of a companion to yourself?

ISAAC: That's a really wonderful question. I mean, what I know is that I have always been my own companion. On some level, I've just been waiting for myself to come home to myself. The surrender to what is, is how I got there—when the depression maxed out and got so bad that I couldn’t fight anymore. But I don’t think it was suddenly a positive companionship right off. So like, if we split this question apart, and also ask when did you become okay with being your own companion? Like, when did that actually start to feel good? That was a couple years later—I’d retreated in depression to northern Wisconsin, and ‘phase two’ of the whole clean-slate thing was when I moved back to Chicago. That was when being with myself started to feel good.

If one adopts an abused animal from the shelter or something, it takes a while to establish trust. It took me a long while to establish trust with myself after enduring emotional abuse at my own hand. Just because you're a companion to yourself doesn't mean that you're happy about it. It took a while to build that trust and comfort and to slowly shrug off the emotional habits of like, this person that I am with, who is me, is all of these awful things. It took me a while to load in enough positive memories, to make enough positive experiences to let that stuff start to fade out.

ERICA: Thanks for sharing all that and being vulnerable.

ISAAC: Totally. What's awesome about being queer and what sucks about being queer is how hard it is for many of us to get to a point where we choose the freedom that we had already. And that's a very brief way to say it, but doesn't have a lot of room for all the ways in which it's easy to not feel free. Like, family pressure or societal restrictions, physical unsafety, that all exists—but at some level, we all have some access to freedom. And what's awesome about being queer is that for me, at some point, it was impossible to move forward without recognizing that I had that freedom. I kind of feel bad for cis-white-straight guys, because it's gonna take them all so long to figure out that deprogramming themselves is even necessary.

REBEKAH: There’s a line from your article, Isaac, that I want to throw into the mix: you wrote, ‘to be a living creature is to improvise’. I would love to hear more from either of you on that.

ISAAC: Totally. To be bound to a single perspective on this planet means that we don't have all the information. But, like, biologically, we're wired to figure out how to be alive one minute from now and one day from now. On some level, it's survival, having imperfect information, right? And we’re trying to figure out how to maximize the odds of being able to have a meal tomorrow or to reproduce or whatever, on that level. And when I say we have ‘imperfect information’, the idea is that we can't know everything because we can't—it just wouldn't fit in our brains and our bodies, but also the ways we have of knowing can't be precisely mapped out. So just being honest about the fact that we are all just in a constant state of bewilderment, at some level, in the face of all that exists. Being clear with myself about that gives me more license to trust things without understanding them fully. I can't possibly perfectly guarantee that anything is going to happen the way that I expect it to. And if I just accept that fact, then I suddenly gain a whole lot of permission to do my best and be chill about it if it's surprising, and be open to it being surprisingly good, which I find it usually is.

ERICA: I really love your map metaphor for it all—how you wrote that tossing out the map is so universal. That's such a thing. Thinking about what it means to be a living thing and to improvise, and how sometimes we’re handed a map because society says ‘this is the safe path’. That's generally what a lot of adults want to give children—like, here are the safe ways to do things because if you deviate from this bad things might happen, and we want to protect you. For me, being able to improvise feels like the interplay between love and fear. For me, I feel like it has to come from a place of love on some level, because otherwise I wouldn’t improvise and stay in the fear place and not grow.

REBEKAH: It's almost like that internal permission to be like, ‘actually, in my experience this old map is not working, so I'm going to improvise and write something new’, possibly leads to a place where you’re comfortable to start saying something about the pattern—to have a perspective on what kind of patterns might actually feel more spacious. And maybe this is where Lightward enters the scene, you know? I’m curious: as you're finding different patterns for your own lives, what does it look like to build in space for surprise?

ERICA: Even before I started working at Lightward, I already was open to the fact that this is a place where I don't have to ‘stay in my lane’, because that's what I was used to for every single past job. At Lightward, because we don't have these rigidly-defined silos, you know, for our jobs and whatnot, there’s automatically space to be curious. And I wrote about this—I’ve experienced what spaciousness means in tandem with the spaciousness created in my life from my own queerness and that acceptance. It's almost like I don't know which came first, the chicken or the egg—it was all just kind of like, everything at the right time—there’s space for this. And honestly, the space at Lightward has given me more openness and curiosity for that part of myself, which is also tied to my creativity. All those things play back and forth into each other. Because I've been doing more creative stuff in my own personal time, that vibe gets carried over into work. And so there's more room for creativity, even in the way I reply to merchants that I'm supporting—I have more room for multiple alternative solutions. There’s spaciousness there. It's made work more enjoyable in that sense, because I don't feel like there's this one way, or that this is the map for how we do it. I don’t feel like I have to do it exactly like Jed or Ken or Tristan or someone else. It's more like, there's this way, and there's also this way to do it.

ISAAC: Amazing, amazing, amazing. I didn't know that this stuff extended to that specific thing: problem-solving with person x, who showed up today—that's deeply cool and is a sign of a real thing. If it shows up at different levels like that, that's a good sign.

ERICA: It feels very meta.

ISAAC: Self-similar patterns. That's a thing that I watch for and I'm seeing here. That makes me really happy. The whole map discussion I wrote about—throwing away the map—all of that is real and true. But also, I can totally contradict myself and say that Lightward is my best attempt at making a map. But it's more of like a Marauder’s Map type thing, where like, it's shifting with whatever it needs to, with whatever's real out there at the moment. I do my best to try to make sense of the world, and that includes my certainty that not all of it is comprehensible—in the specifics, anyway.

For me, the answer’s just to leave lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of blank space. And that's not enough by itself. It's the combination of leaving lots of space for the actual experience of the thing, coupled with confidence and trust that it's going to work and we're going to get on to the next thing afterwards. Either of those things by themselves won’t work. If you just leave lots of space and then sit back and fold your arms, then I've removed myself from the equation. It's that combo of leaving lots of space, and active trust. It's not just me saying I trusted, so it's gonna be okay—it’s actually taking the jump, and demanding of the universe to show me how trustworthy it is, in a way. Which is connected to the queerness thing, because no one knows what's going to happen when they come out. It's always a risk to add new information to someone else's plate. This is also tied to the improvisation thing—I don't know what's coming, so let me improvise and see what I can do. We’re an ensemble engaged in performance and there's lots of room for improv. And in fact, we're relying on that. We're trusting that the way each of us is improvising along the way is going to result in something cool. We're betting the whole business on that every day.

REBEKAH: I'm feeling very lit up hearing y'all talk. I get excited about the spaciousness Lightward holds and the ways queer-visible folks are bringing more spaciousness to external structures by building upon that sense of internal spaciousness they’ve often had to carve out for themselves. Because the external world hasn’t as readily given that spaciousness to them, they’ve had to find it on their own. I have this strong sense that queer folks are the leaders who are going to get us to where we’re going, on a consciousness-level. The only way we're going to be able to get to where we're going is with a fuck-ton of spaciousness to hold the expansive souls we are, and queerness is the closest thing we have to to understanding the nature of soul, I think.

ERICA: Yeah, I see it that way, too. I feel like that's why it's been possible for me to operate in the way I have in the past year. I keep coming back to that feeling of, it's okay to do these things, it's safe to do these things. I remember at the beginning of working at Locksmith, Isaac said, ‘it’s not prescriptive—you can set up your day however you want.’ And I think that this is the first place where I'm thinking to myself, how would I redesign my day and my life? Like, what am I going to do? It's almost like a trail, if we're following the movement of desire—tying it back to that idea—like, this moment led to that moment to that moment to that moment. It started with a little bit of freedom, and then it expanded for me to like, more freedom, like, I feel like that space grew. And that's when I came into more acceptance of being queer, being autistic, my sexual orientation, the way I operate in the world.

ISAAC: I'm so glad you said all that because another question I have is about you using the journal as a way of coming out again, but on your own terms. What I have written underneath that in my notes here is, ‘this is deeply fucking cool and gives me the shivers a little bit’— because it does. I’m curious about all this and how you arrived at that place. It's so fucking cool.

ERICA: Thank you. I have multiple therapists who I started going to originally because I was like, how do I deal with homophobic family? Going through that process and having the support of therapists, friends, and being in a work environment like this—because I feel safe overall, I can come out on my own terms. I know that I have support. So instead of going through this cyclical pattern of trying to gain acceptance from people who are never going to accept that part of me—and I know I shouldn't say never, but like, they're likely not going to because of the patterns I've seen—now I know that there are other patterns that are serving who I actually am authentically, better. Which is why I feel like that is happening now. The more I accept other people that don't support me without hoping for their perspective to change, the less I try to make myself small. I know who supports me and I have that support. I feel more internally balanced and strong. I feel like I can be more visible.

ISAAC: That makes a ton of sense. This idea feels useful, like, it's okay to start with something small and safe in exercising your own—not even queerness—but like, on the path towards creating a life where you are free with yourself and you get to be be you in all ways. It's okay to start with something that no one else can see. It's still you claiming your own freedom with yourself. No matter how oppressive the environment around you, there has to be one thing you can control enough to do it your way. Even if no one else sees it, even if the only person who is aware that you've made a change is you. Just something to demonstrate to yourself that you can do something as yourself. And then Erica, what you were saying about the people with whom it would probably be safe to show them this part of yourself—like, build up to that. I think the thing I'm trying to say is that I don't think that this shifting into one's own freedom needs to be a cold plunge all at once. You don't have to do the scariest thing first—we can do the gentle thing.

REBEKAH: To close, I'd love to ask about your current understanding and perspective on freedom. At this point in your life, what does freedom mean to you?

ERICA: Freedom, for me, means leaning into full expressions of myself. Allowing and leaving room for whoever it is I am in any given moment and how I'm growing and expanding at any given moment. Freedom is just being able to feel at peace and safe to express who I authentically am, who is in alignment authentically, and not what the world wants to see—but who wants to come out of this brain, of this body. It's being able to express and feel safe doing that.

ISAAC: For me, freedom is permission for myself, I guess, to relax into honesty. It's me saying okay, I actually don't have to struggle against what's real. I actually don't have to try to make this thing comfortable for someone else. I actually don't have to try and contort myself into a different shape. It's truly a sense of relaxing and letting go of all the weights of surrendering from the fight and the struggle.

Which is sort of like a counter-countercultural idea. There's the whole ‘resist’ movement—like, the way we reclaim our freedom is through resistance. And that has its place, but the language we're using here is almost the opposite of that. Like, by dropping the resistance, that's how we find freedom. I'm not trying to reconcile those ideas at all, but there's wisdom to be had in each of these postures, I think.

Freedom is honesty plus honest action, maybe? I can just be honest, and that is okay. That's it. And whatever comes from that, I can work with. I can take action based on what is real, not what I think should be real instead or what you think should be real instead. Permission to let things just be what they fucking are and then permission to respond to that. Not to what we think they should be instead or what do you think there should be instead, or what the fuck ever else. It's very relaxing, actually—after the initial shock of trying to make things into something else, or trying to pretend or to behave like they are something else—it's very relaxing on the other side.

Isaac BowenJune 23, 2023The Now V22