Pride Frees You
Pride is many things to many different people. Most understand it to be negatively connotated in the contemporary world, and some may hardly ever see in their lifetimes the word being used in neutral or optimistic terms. Pride usually must be swallowed, suppressed, and regulated. The humility in Pride forces us to abandon our desires all just to adopt more palatable, digestible presences. Growing up as a closeted bisexual Asian American woman in the depths of Eastern North Carolina couldn’t have been a better experimental test of the average young girl’s bandwidth for an identity crisis.
Repress and assimilate, rinse and repeat.
Pride, to my Vietnamese immigrant family, is one’s love for their culture and community. Pride, to my conservative neighbors, teachers, and peers in Lumberton, is one’s love for their country and history. Pride, to my first ever queer childhood friends, and myself, is one’s love for themselves. A love for oneself, in spite of the fact that we all float around in the same environments that push back against the existence of queerness–to me–is the greatest act of social rebellion. The perfect habitat for self destruction, or reconstruction, the choice is typically yours to make. We euphemized it as self love to first survive, and to second, live. I learned what it was truly like to see the world through the eyes of the “othered” group, the intersectional one that lingers in the corridors because it’s unsure of its place. Once that lens falls over your view, there is hardly ever a way to escape the dimness of it.
That is, until you can recognize that the longer you keep yourself in one place, the longer you stay in the dark about a life much more fulfilling to live.
My favorite thing about Pride month is that there is never an instance where the word Pride does not drive prejudice to the ground. There is no room for prejudice when Pride is all encompassing, I learned that when I attended my first Pride parade in Charlotte during my freshman year of college. Back at home, the celebration of queerness is confined to secret rooms and whispered conversations. When I physically uprooted myself and began accepting the newness of how normal it can be to be queer, Pride completely changed for me. Pride then became a sense of acceptance, a freeing resolution within myself that I am normal. The rejection of abnormality closes us in and squeezes any sense of individuality out of us. Pride freed me. Where there was once a time that Pride brought on a sickly feeling in my tummy that I had to do breath work to get through, Pride now appears to me as a swell of love in my chest. Pain and prejudice may begin with the same letter as Pride, but there is no other word that has more in common with Pride than Love.
Pride freed me. It freed my brokenhearted gay friends, it freed my aimless non-binary and trans friends, and it freed the fractured 21st century we live in. Pride frees you if you can accept that it’s not something to be ashamed of. And even when you can’t accept it, Pride loves you, and it waits patiently for you.
If you or someone you know is struggling with expressing their identity, self love or self esteem, speaking with a licensed professional is helpful. A professional counselor can help you process your feelings, identify coping strategies for managing your emotions in regards to the ways you can heal through any difficult situations surrounding your personhood. Call now if you would like to meet with one of our licensed therapists.