How making room for a rainbow of emotions helped me embrace my queerness and heal.
I generally have a terrible memory, but some moments do stay with me. Unsurprisingly, most of these are linked to important or joyful or traumatic events. A few, however, seem less obviously memorable but my brain, in its wisdom, has still chosen to file them away for future use. One of these memories resurfaced recently when I realised that, had my life not painfully unravelled last year, I wouldn’t have got to where I am now: a place where I understand better how the pieces of me fit together and where I’ve been able to acknowledge and begin to celebrate my queerness.
The memory in question is from 2013 during my Yoga Teacher Training. After dinner, a group of us went for a walk. It was a balmy Spanish evening and as we strolled down a dirt track surrounded by olive groves, one of our teachers recounted something he’d been told during a difficult time in his life. A friend had reassured him: ‘when things feel like they're falling apart they're often just falling into place’. This was probably the moment I least needed to hear those words. I'd just given up a stressful job, got married, taken a sabbatical and begun to build a new life focused around the practice of Yoga. Despite being the furthest from falling apart I’d ever been, my wise old brain chose to download this particular moment for future reference. How well it knows me.
Or perhaps, how well it understands life.
‘When things feel like they're falling apart they're often just falling into place’.
Another of my inexplicably stored memories is from a BBC documentary where physicist, Professor Brian Cox, wanders around a ghost town explaining the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This states that the world always tends towards disorder from order as the arrow of time travels inevitably forwards. While entropy pretty accurately describes what happened as time marched eight years into the future from that evening in Spain, the ensuing disorder was not the catastrophe I might have imagined and the words I remembered did turn out to be helpful, if a little over simplified.
I later realised they’d been inspired by Buddhist teacher, Pema Chödrön, whose book ‘When Things Fall Apart. Heart Advice For Difficult Times’ I bought in 2020 when things had indeed fallen apart. Chödrön writes:
‘Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy’ (Chödrön, 2017:14)
When things did eventually fall apart at the seams: when my marriage broke; when I lost my hopes of being a parent, my home and as a side blow, one of my best friends; when my anxiety felt unbearable; when the world spiralled into a pandemic; when I was locked down alone; when I lost my second job and a big chunk of income... you bet there was grief, relief, misery, joy and everything in between. And there was also space. The structures and rules I’d previously lived by and hung my identity on had fallen away. I was living alone, and had time, so much time, on my hands. It was terrifying. I had a vague sense that I should try to ‘solve’ things but there was a pandemic and I was exhausted so I diligently distracted myself by learning to make sourdough, taking online Spanish classes and watching Schitt’s Creek.
It turns out you can only use Netflix as a coping mechanism for so long and, despite my best efforts, some kind of healing did begin to happen. I didn’t so much allow room for it like Chödrön suggests as find that there was nothing but room for it. As I spent more time just noticing and sitting with my sadness, my relief and my fear without feeling like I needed to fix them, the fallen-apart-ness, the scattered pieces of me, began to rearrange themselves. The result was a slightly different and surprising shape. Parts of me that I’d neglected or downright ignored began to assert themselves: my voice, my creativity, my queerness. ‘Me’ as I understood it, now had this undeniable streak of queer at its centre and it was no longer willing to be ignored. It was both alien and completely familiar and acknowledging it felt like taking a big exhale.
'Me'...now had this undeniable streak of queer at its centre...it felt like taking a big exhale.'
I’ve had lots of opportunity to reflect over these last months as I’ve been growing into my queer identity. I’ve questioned how I could both know and not know I was queer before my life imploded. All I can say is that before things fell apart, my queerness was a deep but unacknowledged knowing. Not a closeted, anxiety thing but a special thing, neglected and unspoken. Maybe my subconscious had decided it was irrelevant, overly problematic, too complicated. Maybe I’ll never really know but giving it room to breathe has started me down a path of enquiry that has already helped so many things make more sense. Just allowing the knowledge that my sexuality is more fluid, encompassing and beautifully complex than I’d given it space to be has led me to explore other assumptions that have been made about me and by me: about attraction, about gender, about my worth, about how I want to show up in the world. Learning and unlearning over the last few months has been, as Pema Chödrön describes, a process of coming together and falling apart, on repeat. It’s been messy, painful and fascinating and I’ve realised it will never end. As things continue to come together and fall apart, I expect there to be as many questions and complexities as there are answers and clarity but I’m going to keep making room for it all to happen because I now understand - that’s where I’ll find healing and the potential for joy.
Article Written By Katie Phelps
(She/Her)
Works Cited
Chödrön, P. (1997 [2017]). When Things Fall Apart. Heart Advice For Difficult Times. London: Thorsons Classics.