“When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.” -Oscar Wilde
The discovery or, more accurately, the assembly of a person’s identity is one of the most crucial processes of their life. Beginning, typically, at the development of a social consciousness or self awareness, the process of culminating an identity is the longest and most complex journey a human ever undertakes. The necessity of a concrete identity is one of the most basic human needs, and often something pursued for the entirety of someone’s life with varying levels of success.
What is often overlooked, however, is the struggles minorities, particularly queer people, face with this task. Growing up is hard enough as a completely “normal” non-minority. You have to sift through thousands of regurgitated opinions and beliefs forced upon you by everyone from family to strangers, individually evaluate and examine each personality trait you have to decide if it should be integrated or purged, and even discern your own core beliefs and philosophies about issues and topics completely outside of yourself.
Now, imagine doing all of this in private, on your own, with the risk of your life as you know it ending should anyone find out you’re undergoing this journey. Add to that, if you will, the pressure of fabricating a faux self discovery or even separate fabricated identity to pacify the public and serve as a defense while you try your best to grow in spite of your environment smothering you. This is the sad reality for the majority of queer youth in the world.
Not only are we tasked with the enormous and sometimes insurmountable seeming task of figuring ourselves out, we also, unlike everyone else, often face the pressure to do so alone due to unaccepting external factors.
Imagine having to figure out who you are and who you want to be and learning that with every step you take, your family grows to despise you more. Imagine the fear associated with anyone discovering the “real you”, and the mounting social and trust issues that inevitably accompany it. Imagine the exhaustion that will result from keeping up your public persona to protect you. It’s all unimaginably difficult to fathom, much less to accomplish, yet queer people have to do it.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the battle doesn’t end when we finally escape said oppressive environments, should we ever. If/once we reach a more open or accepting environment, in which we can finally begin to actually assemble who we are, we have to first devote our time and energy to disassembling the persona we crafted for our survival. That defense mechanism that we fabricated has become intangibly entangled with our identity as a whole; we have bonded to the mask we were forced to put on.
Even when we finally reach the freedom to begin figuring out who we are, we first have to devote our time to figuring out who we aren’t.
This not only means we have a delayed start to the process of self discovery, it means we have an exceptionally difficult extra step before we can begin. Even when we finally reach the freedom to begin figuring out who we are, we first have to devote our time to figuring out who we aren’t.
All that time spent in the closet, whatever dimensions or details it consisted of, is not without consequence. Hiding ourselves for that long and in that crucial time in our development has detrimental effects on our psyche, sometimes for life. A queer person has every possibility in the world to go through the rest of their life not only unsure of who they are, but unsure how and/or unwilling to share that with the world.
Spending so much time carefully selecting which pieces of ourselves see the light of day takes its toll, often in an inability to allow certain parts to ever be touched by the sun. Even after we’re able to, it’s hard. When you’ve spent your life hiding, you don’t just come out and live a normal life the second the danger passes. It takes time, it takes effort, and it almost takes a miracle.
So, the next time you encounter someone who can’t help but make their sexuality or gender “their whole identity”, or someone who can’t seem to shut up about being queer, or even someone who’s unsure where they stand with either sexuality or gender well into their adult life, remember to be kind. This could be the first time they’ve ever had the freedom or safety to actually explore those things. Non-minorities get the luxury of doing this in a time where it is normalized and expected, with sympathy and patience at nearly every corner; this is a luxury we were never given.
It’s a luxury we deserve, too, and the only person who can give it to us is you.
Image: Sharon McCutcheon