Behind the Blog: Taking Up Space

When I finished the last editorial arc, I thought I’d feel ready for what came next.

I didn’t.

I just felt blank. Not burned out, not sad, just… empty in the way a room feels after you’ve moved all the furniture out. The queer nervous system arc had taken a lot out of me, in the best way. It was honest work. Hard work. And when it was done, I sat down to figure out what to write next and came up completely empty.

That blankness scared me more than I expected it to.

Because here’s the thing about building something like Queer and Unbroken: the work and the person doing it are not separate things. When I go quiet creatively, it’s rarely just about content. It’s usually about something I’m not ready to say yet.

This is me getting ready to say it.

What the Silence Was Actually About

A lot of us who grew up queer learned early that visibility had a price.

I’m not going to rehash the specifics here. You don’t need the full story to understand the shape of it. What I’ll say is this: I learned young that being too fully myself in the wrong spaces could cost me the people and the safety I needed most. So I got good at managing it. Showing up in partial versions. Enough to connect, not enough to risk everything.

That’s not a character flaw. That’s a nervous system doing exactly what it was built to do after being taught that visibility was dangerous.

But those lessons don’t just live in your personal life. They follow you into your work. Into what you choose to write about and what you decide to leave out. Into which parts of yourself you put on the page and which ones you keep quietly to the side, just out of frame.

I’ve been doing that here. Not intentionally. Not dishonestly. Just carefully. Writing toward certain truths without quite landing on them directly. Circling.

The silence after the last arc wasn’t really about not knowing what to write. It was about knowing exactly what I needed to write next and not being sure I was ready to do it.

The Car Wash That Changed Things

Last weekend, I showed up to a car wash fundraiser.

That sounds mundane. It was anything but.

I’m a Postulant with the Orlando Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. If you’re not familiar, the Sisters are a queer order of drag nuns with chapters around the world, dedicated to community service, LGBTQIA+ visibility, and what they call the expiation of stigmatic guilt. Showing up as a Sister means showing up in full habit, fully painted, fully present as something loud and queer and unapologetic.

For this car wash, that meant a cute one-piece bathing suit. In drag. In public. On a busy street in Orlando.

There is no small way to do that.

And something about being asked to just take up space that completely, that visibly, that joyfully, without any option to make myself more manageable or more palatable to whoever happened to drive by, cracked something open in me.

I’ve been working on radical visibility as a concept for a while now. I wrote an entire blog post about it today. But standing on a sidewalk in a bathing suit and a habit, waving at strangers and washing cars in the Florida heat, I stopped thinking about it as a concept and started feeling it as a choice. A real one, made in real time, with a real body.

It felt like waking up.

And when I got home and sat down to think about what I actually wanted to say next on Queer and Unbroken, the answer came through much clearer than it had in a couple weeks.

What I’ve Been Writing Around

I’m genderqueer.

I’ve known this for a while. And I’ve been writing adjacent to it for a while too, covering identity, covering the nervous system, covering belonging, without ever just saying that directly. Without making myself the subject in that particular way.

The upcoming series of articles on genderqueer and genderfluid identities isn’t just a content decision. It’s a personal one. I’m covering genderfluid identity because it’s closely related, because it matters, and because the people who need that information deserve to find it here. But genderqueer is mine. That’s my identity. And it’s time I stopped writing around it.

That’s what radical visibility actually looks like from the inside. Not a grand announcement. Not a performance. Just deciding that the thing you’ve been carefully keeping just off the page belongs on it.

I chose to write the blog post that goes with this BTB because it was time. Time to stop managing how much of myself I let into the work. Time to stop waiting until I was more certain, or more ready, or more something. The car wash reminded me that you don’t have to be ready. You just have to show up.

So I’m showing up. In a bathing suit, metaphorically speaking. In public.

The Work Continues

This is not a resolution. I want to be honest about that.

Choosing visibility, whether it’s standing on a sidewalk in drag or writing your truth into a blog post, doesn’t close the belonging wound. It doesn’t undo the years of careful self-management or quiet the nervous system overnight. It’s not a finish line.

What it is, is a practice. And like any practice, some days it’s graceful and some days it just means you did it anyway.

What I’m stepping into with this next arc is both professional and personal. I want to write about genderqueer and genderfluid identities in a way that’s genuinely useful to people who are trying to understand themselves or someone they love. And I want to do that as someone who is actually living inside one of those identities, not just reporting on them from a careful distance.

That feels important. It also feels vulnerable in a way that I’m still getting used to.

The Sisters work is part of what keeps me honest about all of this. There’s something about being in community with people who have committed to showing up fully, loudly, joyfully, in service of others, that makes the careful self-management harder to justify. You can’t half-show-up in a bathing suit on a public street. And I don’t think I can half-show-up here anymore either. If there’s room in this world for me to do that, there’s certainly room in this world for you, too, no matter who you are.

Queer and Unbroken exists because I wanted a place where queer people could feel less alone and more connected to themselves. I can’t build that and keep myself at arm’s length from it at the same time.

So this is me closing that gap.

For You

You’re here because you chose to be part of the deeper conversation. That means something to me.

I’d love to know what’s true for you right now:

• What’s something you’ve been circling around, in your work or your life, that might be ready to land?

• What would it look like to take up space in the way that scares you most?

• Is there something you’ve been keeping just off the page, or just out of frame, that belongs in the picture?

You don’t have to have it figured out. Neither do I. But I’m done waiting until I do.