A story of Living as a Queer Person.

What does your queerness feel like?

it’s just this bag of question marks that I carry with me everywhere, it’s just … I may find answers to this. I’m questioning my entire romantic, sexual, gender identity- my “self” is under the question mark, by my own self. I need some concreteness before I can even communicate it to someone else. Or maybe not.

Are there any instances, places, people, activities that sort of lessen the heaviness of this bag?

Yeah, absolutely. Sometimes I don’t need to take the bag of questions to places. I don’t feel the heaviness of the bag where I can be whatever I want to be at that point of time. I’m not checking in to make sure I’m anything other than myself.

It’s lighter with my group of closest friends, I only have a handful now and some people I’ve met randomly along the way, just random people.

What does your queerness look like?

if I give it some kind of tangible form, it feels like a big slushy watery slimy ball which is gigantic and it’s translucent and it has these glowing holographic particles in it. You can squish it together, put it in a box, make it hard, put it in the freezer, melt it. It can vaporize itself, hide from you, block your way. It can do everything.

It is the most multi-hyphenated amorphous being to have ever come across anyone. It feels like translucent slime. It’s everything and nothing at the same time.

There is some self-induced condescension, I think- that this is something I have to do anonymously. I should have had the guts to deal with the consequences of sharing my story. But there’s also acute awareness of the fact that it’s just my circumstances, and I’m choosing mental peace over lots of turmoil, which I don’t have the tools to easily move through right now, and also necessity because:

What am I seeking from getting the approval of my parents? What point am I making? Why do I need them to be okay with me being a certain way?

When it’s time it will happen anyway. I will not be able to deny myself that bare minimum. I don’t know if it feels exactly like a double life. It’s just that I feel like I’m giving such curated content to some people in my life, and I don’t want to put on that filter, that’s all.

Yet being open also means not being impacted by what people close to you think about you. Once that little disconnect happens… then it’s easier, but that disconnect has not happened just yet for me because there are lots of aspects of life where I am not fully independent and things are conditional. Following my heart means I have to just go through it this way; that’s all for me.

Sanjana: Following your heart with rules and conditions applied.

Yeah. My story’s title.

We just eventually learn to live with this; in the shadow of all these questions.

Sanya : Yeah, I think you also make or choose your own answers.

And maybe the answer is that there are no answers. You just learn to accept it slowly.

Love that.