Embracing Being (Queer) Enough
“Queer’ not as being about who you’re having sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but ‘queer’ as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.”
Last year, during the month of June, I noticed my own queer imposter syndrome come up. I avoided posting anything on my social media, engaging within the community, or adding to conversations. As an out queer person, I still struggled with expressing my experience or voice within the LGBTQIA+ community, fearing it would not be appropriate or a worthy addition. I remember sharing my concerns to my girlfriend at the time - wondering how I can show up as a resource when I, myself, “didn’t have my shit together, sorted, or figured out”. Their compassionate understanding, despite not eliminating or reducing the fear, was enough to feel less alone with it.
I have come to realize that many of us share a similar worry and there are many ways and many reasons that the queer imposter syndrome shows up in the community. For one, we live in a society - an awfully hetero- and mono-normative one. How it has been structured and habitually instilled in us to engage within it offers limited opportunity to recognize and make room for anything non-normative. This seeps into queer spaces and is expressed through internalized homophobia and transphobia. Community members have gate-kept queerness and practiced identity policing. This could be experienced through a pressure towards meeting certain stereotypes or expectations and through erasure of select identities within the community. As a result, we can notice hyper-vigilance, anxiety, or hostility around how we are made visible and who and how we relate to. It can feel like we are constantly fighting and re-shaping ourselves in an effort to belong - whether we are experiencing this conflict socially, interpersonally, or internally.
As addressed by bell hooks, accepting and celebrating queerness is recognizing and honouring the resistance and resilience of self. Within queer spaces, we are encouraging our community members to find strength and further opportunities to create the versions of self and of livelihood and of relationships that offer authentic alignment.
To maintain this spirit, I hope we can find strength to continue to do the work - whether we approach it through toughness or through gentle power. To do so, here are just a few prompts to invite you to this practice:
Offer compassion to be fluid and evolving in our identities and relational practices. Give yourself and others permission to explore and change.
Lived experience, history, and research will show how vastly complex and fluid our identities are. Theories that suggest a development of a fixed identity have been debunked and given room for the acknowledgement of fluid and plastic biological and social expression. Although there is comfort in the order and reliability of sameness, embracing our humanity can allow us the natural progression of an evolving self with compassion and unconditional regard. The change we experience as we continue becoming does not invalidate our queerness. Step into your own version of queerness and make it make sense to you. Share stories to expand awareness and representation of diverse, intersecting options.
Compounded by the aforementioned social challenges we face to be recognized and represented, being able to share our narratives collectively can encourage us to be affirmed, at the very least, within our own community (and hopefully be able to expand and do so in new ones). To counter identity policing, we can empower ourselves and one another to invent the versions of self, livelihood, and relations that suit us and our needs and learn new ways to co-exist. Strengthen personal resilience. Our fear of enough-ness likely doesn’t end with our queer identity
Lastly but just as importantly, we can work towards understanding the depth of our “enoughness” wound. It is a known reality that folks in the LGBTQIA+ community experience heightened mental health concerns as a result of minority stress and limited access to affirming care. The social failures further do harm by reinforcing the fear that we do not belong. Through personal reflection and community support, we can explore this to externalize shortcomings that are not our own, and notice what we need from ourselves and others to promote self-acceptance in our totality. Through these practices, let this year’s Pride month be a stepping stone towards a continuation of embracing being (queer) enough.
