Journal Highlight: Exploring Queerness
The following essays appear in Lightward Journal Vol. 1. Read the full conversation inspired by the essays in Lightward Journal, 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.
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.