It’s Pride 2022 And It’s Like High School All Over Again

“Today you are you! That is truer than true! There is no one alive who is you-er than you!” — Dr. Seuss
(Photo credit and gratitude: Tim Bieler on Unsplash)

I don’t know about you but Pride Month 2022 has been an emotional rollercoaster for me. And we’re talking a Kingda Ka level ride. I am quite literally feeling ALL the feels. At times all at once. For so many reasons. The most major being that it’s my first real Pride 🏳️‍🌈. The first Pride celebration that hasn’t been canceled since I chose to come out as queer in the middle of a pandemic during Pride Month 2020.

A middle that wasn’t a middle.

A pandemic that wasn’t singular.

I was fifty-three and a quarter years old.

My timing was both divine and strange. It felt — and still feels — true at a soul level. And yet, because of the pandemics plural that have been unfolding ever since and the restrictions they’ve imposed, it’s meant that this new facet of my identity still feels more conceptual than actual. More potential than practice. And yet, more alive — and more enlivening — than ever.

So much has changed and much remains the same. I am (still) a woman seeking and, though I no longer feel like a baby queer, it seems I’ve now reached the teenage phase of the coming out/becoming journey and I feel like I’m back in high school. With all the fear, insecurity, and awkwardness that implies.

So High School

High school was one of the more awkward stages of my life. A life that for at least the first 25ish years was pretty f***ing awkward. I switched schools and started 9th Grade at an amazing and rather intimidating all-girls high school in NYC, entering a well-established social group of forty-eight, passionate and outspoken super-women-to-be, many of whom had known each other since kindergarten.

Thankfully, as high school experiences go, mine was relatively mean girl and bully-free. The Brearley girls in my class welcomed me and I made friends across the various social groups. Despite this, I always felt peripheral. On the outside, looking in. I never felt like I truly belonged, nor did I ever feel central to or firmly established in any of these circles of belonging. I would hear about social events and plans and always felt invited not invited. “Yeah, sure you can come”. Or “Oh, yeah, you should join” they’d say, but the details often never came and I would spend hours waiting by the phone (yes, back in the mid 80s, we literally sat by the phone in anticipation), usually with floods of tears. Waiting for the call that more often than not never came or at least never came without a lot of chasing on my part.

Chasing Belonging

Chasing belonging is not a fun feeling. It’s something that, as Francis Weller points out in his book The Wild Edge of Sorrow, we are not wired for. Human beings are designed—and our bodies anticipate and crave on a cellular level—to be born into belonging. Into a loving, abundant collective of beings with myriad adult guides rather than to isolated, nuclear families. Our birthright rescinded by the nature of our “modern civilization. Civilization that is not civil and modernity that is increasingly Byzantine, we instead chase belonging from birth.

All of these high school feelings came flooding back as June arrived and Pride Month 2022 began. Because once again, I find myself on the outside of a collective of women with established social groups and decades of experience that I don’t have. And I really really want to go to Pride this year. And yet I don’t really feel like part of the tribe. I don’t even know what going to Pride really means. I’ve spent the month soaking in a cauldron of fear, insecurity, and awkwardness. And for anyone who knows 56 year old me, this is like the Anti-Kate, the opposite of my natural state. At this point in my life, I’m pretty fearless and secure in myself and willing to dive into any social situation, no matter how large, unknown, or established, and show up and engage fully — joy-fully!

So What’s Underneath The Fear?

I’m still really early on my journey of being and becoming queer. And between pandemic restrictions and the fact that I’m not a swiper, my dating and relationship experience and my knowledge of same-sex dating and mating rituals and practices are extremely limited. I really don’t know what I don’t know and am afraid of making a mess.

So What’s Underneath The Insecurity?

I am a newly queer woman seeking women in a community of women that I’m new to. A community in the Bay Area where there are longstanding relationships and history. All of which is reminiscent of my all girls high school experience and is reanimating all the same teenage longings and associated host of feels. The fact that this is happening to a woman in her mid 50s makes it all the more awkward and strange. Being so new to dating and sex with women is bringing me back to my early experiences with dating men which were honestly pretty fraught and emotionally charged, plagued with insecurity, self-doubt, and more chasing than attracting.

Why Is It SO Important That I Go To Pride?

I want to find community and belonging with my brothers and sisters—and all of the beautiful beings who don’t identify as either, or who are both/and—along the radiant rainbow of Pride 🌈. And I want to continue to explore what being queer means to me.

Equally importantly if not more so, I want show up for my community during a time where our rights are being threatened in all the ways! I struggle to put into words how heartbroken, horrified, and enraged I am by the current state of LGBTQIA+ rights specifically, and equality more generally in our country and our world, and by the vicious, unrelenting assaults on and violence and cruelty towards those whose only ask is that we be treated as equal humans with all the respect, rights, and privileges afforded that status.

Where I Am In This Moment?

I’m still here. I’m still queer. And I still have so many more questions that I do answers. I hope and expect that this will always be the case because, as I said in my coming out piece:

“Life is a journey, not a destination. And if we’re fortunate, we’re always becoming.”

Two years into this mystical and courageous journey of exploring the vast unknown territory that is the multiverse of me, I’m still here. Still #queer. Still curiously seeking. Building a daily practice based on Rilke’s invitation to live the questions. From a posture of humility and curiosity. My intentions: grounded expansion, eudaemonia, and ever-increasing aliveness.

There are still — and will always be — far more unknowns than known. And this, dear ones, is one of the precious gifts of my one wild and precious life. That no matter how much I explore, how much I come to “know”, there will always be more that is not known. Which means more to explore, more to discover, more to experience, more to share. And this, beloveds, is the secret to eternal youth—to ensuring that when I take my last breath, I’ll have a twinkle in my eye and a look of wonder and awe on my face.

The honest truth is that I’ve never really fit in and have come to realize that this is actually a wonderful thing. Because that fitting in implies a container and in my experience, I’ve never found a container that made space for all of me. Because to paraphrase Walt Whitman, I am vast and I contain a multiverse.

My intention is to spend every moment of this one wild and precious life exploring and discovering with curiosity and wonder, all that the vast Multiverse of Me contains. Seeking to more deeply know and love myself and to expand into the fullness that I was born to be. I will continue to use my superpowers as the Vulnerability Doula to guide and bear witness to my fellow beings on their own courageous journeys of becoming. What a Metaverse of We together we will be!

Happy Pride ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜