During my Queer Affirmative Counseling Practice training with the Mariwala Health Initiative, I was fortunate to learn from lived experience, and those lessons helped me hold compassion and respect for queer love and the people working to support queer relationships. But each day of the 4-day course, I was left with a bittersweet feeling, and somewhere during the second day, during casework, I realized that feeling was grief.
All the cases discussed, all the stories heard, all the narratives analyzed had one theme that kept recurring: being queer involves becoming familiar with grief and carrying it as part of your daily life. Being queer involves coming to terms with the fact that grief is something we carry daily, and at some point, the grief becomes a reminder of the love lost.
Grieving the Love we Hoped we’d Receive
We’re told that family is everything, and that family is all we need to support us through our lives, so when the same family leaves us stranded, the feelings of loss and abandonment are very loud and chilling. As children, we hold our family core to our identity, and then when we finally learn the parts of our identity that are genuinely ours, that same family becomes a stranger. For many queer people, this is the first grief we experience: learning that accepting our identity means accepting that people in our lives would not want to share the joy of acceptance and validation.
Queer children are children. That is all that matters. The fact that we need to grieve a love that we were told we would always receive is heartbreaking, but it also allows us to open our hearts to the love that welcomes us, sees us, and continues to love us - our chosen family. When we decide who is part of our chosen family, we get to decide how we receive and show them love, and in doing so, we learn that if some people can learn to accept our love and some refuse to do so, maybe our love was never the problem.
The Grief of Being Outed
It is unfortunate and unjust, but sadly, there are moments when we are outed without our consent, and that takes away from our independence, our control, and our sense of identity. Coming out is a personal decision, and this means that we should have complete autonomy over who knows what parts of our identity. As queer people, we live with the fear of being outed, and choosing to come out to someone itself can be a harrowing process - being outed can enhance that fear, loneliness, and sense of loss of control.
When someone outs us without our consent, they take away our liberty to exist on our own terms. When someone outs us, they take away our freedom to be as we are, how we are. When someone outs us, we don’t know how safe we are anymore. Being queer in India is an experience that is already surrounded by fear, unsafety, and distress; being outed can amplify that distress and cause more harm. Think of coming out as an experience that gives you meaning - if someone took away that meaning, wouldn’t you grieve?
The Grief of having to Hide your Love
Queer people constantly have to hide their love. They need to be very vigilant about spaces where they can and can’t express their love for each other, and this whole process of walking on eggshells diminishes the experiences of queer love. Seeing love being expressed freely and openly in cis-het relationships, and knowing that your ability to do that rests on people who should have no say in the matter makes you question if your love is even worth it. But it is!
To every queer person reading this - your love is worth it, has been worth it, and will always be worth it. People not seeing your love shows the fact that their eyes are covered by glasses of a queerphobia backed by culture, religion, biology, and all the rubbish they need to make us feel ‘lesser’, ‘abnormal’, or ‘different’. But our love is love. Our love deserves to be seen, heard, validated, and lived.
The Grief of Time Lost
So much of life passes by when we’re busy performing for the cis-het lens. So much of life remains hidden when we’re busy trying to survive. So much of life gets taken away when we are finally allowed to live after decades of being shunned. Being queer involves grieving the time lost in surviving that could’ve been enjoyed in thriving if only this society did not perceive us as ‘sinners’. Being queer involves the acceptance that time lost will never come back, and neither will those moments of young love that we wish we could’ve lived. All we have is the present; no matter how isolated and upsetting it may feel, it is still what we have to work with, because no one is giving us back those years of being scared, closeted, and shunned away as if we were criminals.
A Note to Therapists
When a queer or trans client comes to you, please know that they are already carrying a lot of grief, discrimination, and pain, and if you can’t provide a space for them to be accepted, loved, and validated, then it is your ethical responsibility to refer them to someone who can. If you have any biases, any unresolved issues, or any stereotypes that may be queerphobic or transphobic, trust me - please do the work of unlearning what society has taught you, and relearning from experiences of people who have lived queer and trans lives.
Queer and trans people have an equal right to be able to access therapeutic spaces without having the fear of being judged, and if you can’t provide that space for them, it’s time you do some self-reflection and self-work to become inclusive, because as the course taught me, being inclusive is basically our job. It is literally the biggest part of our job description. So, unlearn your internalized queerphobia and transphobia, and relearn unconditional positive regard, respect, and authenticity when working with queer and trans clients.
Queer people deserve the space to grieve what society has taken from them, the freedom to love without having to justify themselves, and the opportunity to build lives in which survival is no longer the price of belonging.